A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic - Laura Dodsworth (the first e reader .txt) 📗

regularly denouncing dissenters in Twitter threads. He was praised for his efforts by fellow MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who said he was doing ‘a fantastic job’,2 leading some to believe that O’Brien was acting unofficially on the government’s behalf. The website contained ‘lists’ of people as well as general claims that he deemed wrong and misleading. Some saw this as an important service in combatting ‘disinformation’, such as Rees-Mogg. Some were troubled that an MP, both a public servant and someone holding a position of authority, created lists of British citizens in order to pillory them and digitally ‘cast them out’.

The lists are also one-sided. They only include people who have made mistakes that go against the government narrative. The government, its ministers and SAGE advisors have also made mistakes during the epidemic but they are not included on the lists. A one-sided presentation of mistakes betrays the intention to silence particular voices and views. Mistakes will be made, and they should be accounted for. We all make mistakes. The danger is when mistakes are weaponised to intimidate and stifle debate.

The website Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ may even make mistakes of its own. After all, how can all the Covid science be definitely settled? How can the website creators be confident that they arbitrate the absolute truth? One of the refutations caught my eye. The website asserts that ‘suicide rates have not risen during lockdowns, either in the UK or worldwide’. A report3 from the University of Manchester looked at ‘real-time surveillance’ and claimed there was no evidence of a rise of post-lockdown suicides. As I explained in Chapter 11, ‘Counting the dead’, it is too soon to be certain about UK suicides, and I expect the same is true internationally.

Neil O’Brien’s Twitter attacks felt dogged and personal. Journalists with strong personalities were better able to weather the slings and arrows. The distinguished scientists were probably more discomfited by their placement on the lists, including two from the UK’s Oxford University: Professor Sunetra Gupta, a highly regarded Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, and Dr Carl Heneghan, a GP, clinical epidemiologist and a Fellow of Kellogg College, the director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. Dr Clare Craig, a diagnostic pathologist, also came under fire for asking controversial questions about the PCR testing. She described the attacks by O’Brien as ‘bullying’ and responded on Twitter: ‘Almost none of Neil O’Brien’s tweets about me offered evidence to prove me wrong. I believe his intention is to deter me and other people from speaking out. I am concerned that a Government representative would behave this way about good faith scientific discussion.’4

Public execration has a silencing effect. When dissent is framed as mistaken, irresponsible and ‘dangerous’5 it creates serious personal, public and professional consequences for the individuals and beyond. Speaking out during the epidemic felt akin to questioning the Church, rather than contributing to an ongoing scientific debate or discussing the political decisions made in a democracy. That is not a healthy situation for journalism, science or public debate. Democracy requires a free press and free speech.

But is scapegoating simply driven by individuals, such as O’Brien, or do we have to accept something about human nature? It might be a natural human tendency to scapegoat from a position of assumed moral high ground. A study, Moralisation of Covid-19 health response: Asymmetry in tolerance for human costs,6 found that during Covid ‘health-minded approaches have been moralised, even to the point of a sacred value’ and that ‘merely questioning sacred values led to moral cleansing’. Defending lockdowns and restrictions was seen as moral, and questioning them seen as immoral. As a consequence, the human costs of the restrictions were under-acknowledged, de-prioritised and granted less moral weight. The report warned this could lead to ‘deaths of despair’ among those human costs. As we have seen, proponents of lockdowns might wish (even unconsciously) to underplay these in order to remain comfortable on the moral high ground.

The Behavioural Government series by the Behavioural Insights Team talked about how we reject ideas from another group, even if they are good ideas: ‘If another party does not think the same way, then our preferred reaction is not to reassess our own opinions. Instead, we try to come up with ways of denigrating the opposition. This happens because we find it hard to maintain both a positive image of ourselves and a positive image of someone who disagrees with us… we decide that those who think differently are biased, through ideology, self-interest, malice or stubbornness. While we have considered the issue carefully, they are just proceeding from dogma. This perception of bias makes conflict and division escalate further… This process happens most clearly between competing interest groups, where it has been called the ‘devil shift’: seeing your opponents as more extreme and more ‘evil’ than they actually are.’7

This goes some way towards explaining the viciousness towards opposite views in the Covid epidemic. Someone can happily justify their ‘inquisitor’ status when the ‘devil shift’ has occurred. You would think that, as this explanation emanated from behavioural scientists embedded in government, the government would learn from it, rather than permit or encourage an MP to denigrate people with opposing views. This perspective from BIT could also explain why people on the left did not oppose lockdown even though it disproportionately harmed the poor and vulnerable, because they did not think it was possible that they could share the same perspective as those on the right, or libertarian, side. Oppositional group thinking creates tribalism and closes minds to different points of view. Response to lockdown was hyper-partisan.

People who questioned the use of lockdown were sometimes labelled ‘lockdown sceptics’. Being sceptical can be seen as a positive attribute, which is probably why the terminology shifted to ‘Covid denier’. This reframing made people seem silly rather than sceptical, as though they denied the existence of the virus, rather than questioned public health policies. The word ‘denier’ conjures the callousness of