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

I asked Ullum why the study did take so long to be published, given that masks were such a controversial and un-evidenced imposition on people around the world? He was evasive: ‘your guess is as good as mine’. Maybe it’s just not the done thing for scientists to criticise the publications which publish them? You don’t want to bite the hand that feeds your future credibility. Maybe there’s an embarrassment that the study didn’t produce the positive results the team were looking for. Ullum was so keen not to blame the publications he even suggested that ‘maybe they thought the science is not good enough’. Really? His science wasn’t good enough? But it was peer-reviewed and published. He qualified: ‘If you look at the confidence limit of our results they were quite wide. No statistical difference means there could be major effects hidden because the sample size is not big enough.’

I asked outright if the difficulty in finding a publication was, in fact, political. Was the study a hot potato? ‘No,’ he said, ‘there was tension about masks but I don’t think it was politically motivated.’ He did concede that ‘the editors don’t want their publication to upset the handling of an epidemic on a global scale. Almost all health authorities are promoting mask-wearing, we don’t want our paper to disturb that. There was no evidence to support not wearing masks. There was slight data in favour of mask-wearing. As a researcher I also don’t want our data to disturb public health policy.’

I asked if the delays, the controversy and criticism from both sides of the mask debate would be bad for science: would it put scientists off taking risks? ‘I’ve been a researcher for 30 years and I have not experienced anything like it,’ Ullum said. ‘This experience was because Covid is so high on our political agenda at the moment. We’ll go back to normal. Vaccines and warm weather in the spring will bring normality.’

I agreed that I hoped normality would return in the spring, after a long year. I wondered what he thought of the level of fear people feel about Covid, and he said ‘we haven’t managed the fear well enough. There has been too much fear. This is a serious epidemic, and we need to do the right things, but it’s not an apocalypse.’

Censorship was evident across science, journalism and politics. Lucy Easthope is used to being seen as a ‘wild card’ in government advisory meetings. She told me the UK didn’t follow existing science and pandemic planning during the Covid epidemic. Lockdown went against previous protocol and there was ‘a cost to that’. Lockdown is ‘now ingrained deeply into our psyche. People made choices to not see loved ones, they made decisions they have to live with, it’s going to be very difficult to admit it was a mistake.’ I asked if she thinks people will be able to admit mistakes, or see there were other paths to follow? ‘They will fight us like weasels in a bag.’

Part of the fight is pre-emptive censorship. I talked about the inhibiting effects of Ofcom’s guidelines in Chapter 2, ‘Fear spreads in the media like an airborne virus’. The Big Tech platforms also developed policies designed to counter ‘disinformation’. We saw interviews with established scientists removed from YouTube, and articles published on Facebook from sources as respected as The Spectator and Unherd were flagged as containing ‘potentially false’ information for including the wrong views from the wrong people; where ‘wrong’ means counter to government or WHO advice. A video interview with Professor Karol Sikora, a world-leading oncology expert and a former Chief of the Cancer Program of the WHO, was removed from Facebook for ‘violating guidelines’. An article by Professor Carl Heneghan about the landmark Danish mask RCT was labelled as containing ‘false information’ on Facebook. Google appeared to shadow ban (whereby the search results are suppressed) the Great Barrington Declaration,11 a website and letter written by respected scientists recommending an approach called ‘focused protection’, in opposition to many countries’ policies of lockdown. Google claimed this was not deliberate, but people were suspicious that the effect was seemingly switched on and then off after there was a fuss.

In traditional media, journalists mocked and discredited the ‘wrong’ scientists. Professor Sikora’s ‘positive’ and ‘balanced’ views were described as ‘dangerous’ in The Guardian.12 The Guardian had particular form for criticising dissenting scientists, also describing the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration as creating a rift which was a ‘dangerous distraction’.13

The ‘devil shift’ was seen all the more clearly through the metaphors used by Paul Mason, who wrote in the New Statesman that ‘like Dante’s inferno, Covid denialism is structured in concentric circles’, and said the innermost circle of hell is reserved for ‘prominent lockdown sceptics such as Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Laurence Fox, Julia Hartley-Brewer and Peter Hitchens’. All bar one are journalists, specifically, in Mason’s view, ‘a bunch of rich, well-connected Conservative journalists’ and their views are ‘dangerous’. The inter-group opposition between leftwing and rightwing journalists seems to have obscured from Mason that all have voiced concerns about the impact of lockdown on the disadvantaged. And so, journalists seek to stifle not just scientists, but also other journalists. Opposite and different views were described as ‘dangerous’ so many times.

In the course of researching this book I was told variously that I was probably under surveillance, that I might not be published again, that I should do a Freedom of Information request to see if there was ‘a file’ on me because I’d put so many awkward questions into the government (incidentally, I never got a reply to that FOI), and that there would probably be a campaign to smear and discredit me before the book was published. So, if any unpleasant rumours emerge, don’t necessarily believe them.

The Covid epidemic has produced scapegoating on a mass scale. Professionals and academics were ‘cast