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

Holocaust deniers. Anyone with any concern or question could be given the umbrella term ‘denier’ – who on earth wants to be on that team? Another label was ‘conspiracy theorist’, which again no one wants to be called. (Some conspiracy theory predictions actually came to pass, but more on that in Chapter 14, ‘Cults, conspiracy and psychic epidemics’.) People with concerns about the vaccines were ‘anti-vax’. One study8 labelled people who didn’t want to wear masks psychopaths. All these labels contribute to a climate of fear which makes people timid about expressing their opinions.

These reports chimed with the on-the-ground views of Professor Ellen Townsend of Nottingham University, a psychologist and specialist in suicide and self-harm, who told me that ‘the culture of suppression and scapegoating of dissenting academic voices in this crisis has been dreadful. Leading experts have been cast as outliers by those in power because their theories and evidence do not fit the official Covid narrative.’ She was also alert to the personal costs, telling me that there were people who might never speak to her again, but she also received emails from people thanking her for speaking up.

Townsend and fellow academics set up Reachwell, a group which focuses on the impacts of lockdown and restrictions on young people, because ‘the refusal to name and account for the harms of restrictions is one of the biggest scientific errors of all time – especially in relation to children and the disadvantaged.’ She told me she had been very concerned about the exploitation of ‘a fear campaign’ to ‘raise the sense of threat and imminent danger of death’, which had left people frightened and bewildered.

I came across Professor Townsend on Twitter. Sadly, during the epidemic she decided to withdraw from the platform. ‘I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Twitter but during the dark days of 2020–21, I witnessed reprehensible behaviour by some academics,’ she told me. ‘People who I previously admired have behaved in dreadful ways and said absolutely vicious things about other academics that were completely unwarranted. Science, or at least scientific debate, has died in these times. I decided to leave the toxicity of Twitter and focus my energies on other ways of communicating that permit dialogue and nuance.’

Two more psychologists, Dr Gary Sidley and Dr Harrie Bunker-Smith, wrote to the British Psychological Society in December 2020 regarding their concerns about the ethics of the government’s use of covert behavioural psychology. Sidley said that it was hard to get co-signatories to the letter because ‘many psychologists working in the NHS are twitchy about their jobs, and the ones in the private sector are nervous because they interact with the NHS. The brainwashing has been so effective that I can understand it – being in a minority is uncomfortable.’

Bunker-Smith, a co-author of the letter, had experienced this discomfort. She said ‘it felt incredibly risky to question the data and the measures’ when she posted on a clinical psychology forum about her ethical concerns. The post had a lot of likes and she received personal messages from people who said they were too scared to like her post or comment. But there were some ‘challenging replies’ and ‘some people were very aggressive, considering it was a professional forum.’ She was called a conspiracy theorist and ‘accused of not caring about the people who died of Covid’. No one wants to be seen as uncaring and these public accusations inhibit professional debate. ‘People told me about personal stories, people they knew who died of Covid,’ she said, ‘and I was told I should join Covid frontline support groups to understand the PTSD they feel. This became very black and white. Psychologists should be able to sit in the grey.’ She has been told she should be struck off from the Health and Care Professions Council and felt she had to be willing to lose her career just to raise questions.

Sidley had hoped more psychologists would be shocked and angry about the policies around lockdown, masks and restrictions that have caused distress to people, but had been in a minority. He expected more to care about the mental health impact. While he thought ‘some would like to speak out about the behavioural science techniques but they are nervous about putting their head above the parapet’, he also thought some ‘think the world might be better after all this for some reason, because they are socialist or worried about the environment’, and yet more were ‘driven by their own fear of death’. Echoing SPI One in a previous chapter he believes psychologists are particularly ‘prone to being more neurotic’.

On 23 March 2021 Sidley received a reply from Dr Roger Paxton, the Chair of BPS’s Ethics Committee, to his letter. It said that although he had intended to raise the ethical concerns voiced in Sidley’s letter at their Ethics Committee meeting in March, the agenda was too full. He promised to raise the concerns at the next meeting in June. We must deduce that the BPS didn’t find the ethical considerations of fear messaging to be troubling or pressing.

Dr Knut Wittkowski, former Head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at Rockefeller University, also experienced troubles online. He was fiercely critical of lockdown measures in an interview on YouTube in the spring of 2020, which garnered nearly 1.5 million views before being removed. The only explanation for its removal was that it ‘violated’ community standards. Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, warned that the platform would remove any information about the virus it regarded as ‘problematic’: ‘Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.’9

Wittkowski seemed bemused when I asked him about the reaction to his views. He told me ‘the reaction generally is good. I don’t come across as somebody who has weird conspiracy theories. I base what I say on data.’ I remembered my own reaction to his views. Back in the early, innocent days of the epidemic when I was vacuuming up as much virus