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

information as possible online, I found Wittkowski. His credentials, experience and views about Covid were interesting and reassuring. Maybe I gravitated to the reassurance at a time when others were feeling panicked, but I liked his interview on YouTube. I remember one of his central points was that there was no reason to believe Covid would be significantly different to all the other respiratory diseases the world had ever known. Extremist views of the pandemic rose to the top of public consciousness, pushed by the media’s helping hands, while his brand of perspective and rationale sank and was drowned by arbitrary censorship decisions.

This wasn’t the first time Wittkowski had been opposed to a fear-mongering ‘constellation of journalists, politicians and doctors’, as he put it. He recalled that during the AIDS scare ‘they said children would be infected by toys. That was one of the images they used to scare people. At that time I stood up and said – correct as it turned out – that it would never spread among Caucasian German heterosexuals. And it did not, of course.’ He perceives a similar programme of fear in play around Covid, which he said is actually ‘not the end of the world’.

Wittkowski had an interesting take on why the video was removed. He said that people were commenting and he was engaging with them in the comments under the video. ‘Interaction is not currently wanted,’ he observed, ‘and that may be another reason YouTube took it down. If people interact they start forming their own opinions.’

I wondered what he thought the solution to this censorship was and he identified the scope of the problem more broadly: firstly, the scale of fear and, secondly, the loss of independent science. He told me that in his view ‘politicians and media are spreading fear. It goes far beyond what the situation would justify. The media makes money by selling fear. People ‘buy’ fear, they listen, they get emotional, they spend more time looking at commercials. For more than 20 years I read the New York Times every morning. Then I cancelled it. I couldn’t stand it anymore. It used to separate reporting and opinion. Not any more. The front page says the numbers are “surging”. That is an opinion. If they said “increasing” that would be reporting.’

What was Wittkowski afraid of? ‘My fear was that one evening I couldn’t go and have dinner any more! But more seriously, giving the government information about who is meeting whom and for how long, tracking us… It is becoming dangerously close to 1984. And like in 1984, it is fear which keeps people in a state where they follow the government. It’s not Oceania and Eurasia anymore, it’s Covid. It doesn’t matter what the fear is. If there is fear you can control the people.’

Of course, I agreed that the media had, regrettably, peddled fear, and the government might be exploiting it. I was keen to know what he meant about the loss of independence in science. He told me the main problem is the way science is funded: ‘When I started my career at university you were fully funded with a salary from the university. People had independence. That is now gone. Virtually all scientists in the field of epidemiology and medicine have university positions where they get a desk and access to a library. In the US the funding comes from the NIH (National Institutes of Health). You don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you.’ I asked how he was able to speak up and he told me ‘the people who have spoken up are retired and so they have independence’ but that when he was at Rockefeller University, he ‘would not have dared to say what I did or I would have compromised the funding’.

I asked how he thought some of the ‘leading’ voices in the pandemic might have been influenced. I was specifically interested in Neil Ferguson, whose modelling was considered partially responsible for triggering lockdowns. He didn’t take the question too seriously because ‘among scientists, Neil Ferguson does not have any credibility because his predictions are always wrong.’

Another scientist who experienced the glare of a controversial public reaction was Henrik Ullum. He was one of the researchers and authors of the Danmask study Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask Wearers.10

At the time of the presidential election Ullum wrote a tweet saying that the researchers were sorry that the publication of the study was delayed, and people inferred that the delay was political. He told me, ‘a lot of people in Denmark and on social media were pissed that we wouldn’t release the data. People thought we were influencing the presidential election.’

As one of Denmark’s social public health scientists, his inbox is always full. He told me that in one day he received three emails which exemplified the reaction to him: ‘One person emailed me asking me to lock the country down and make young people behave well. One person asked me not to be the mouthpiece of the press. Another person accused me of being on an axis of evil with Bill Gates and the Danish prime minister. That’s three emails in one day from one interview on Danish radio.’ As he said, he has ‘received fear and madness in all directions’ during the Covid epidemic.

So, what was so controversial about the mask study? Masks have been mandated around the world despite very little evidence that they are effective. The study was designed to investigate whether the mask-wearer was protected. According to Henrik, the results were ‘weak and insignificant’ and ‘not conclusive’. In both the write-up of the study and in talking with me on the phone, Ullum was careful to say that he didn’t want the data ‘to disturb public health policy’. In fact, since the very muted publication of the study, Ullum has been appointed Director of the Statens Serum Institut, the Danish equivalent of