In March 2023, the BMJ published an article by professors Stephen Reicher, John Drury, Susan Michie and Robert West entitled ‘The U.K. Government’s attempt to frighten people into Covid protective behaviours was at odds with its scientific advice‘. You will note in the declaration of competing interests that they were all Government scientific advisors. All four sat on SPI-B (the U.K. Government’s Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours) and two were also part of ‘Indie SAGE’.
In essence, the article claims that the idea of using fear to induce compliance with lockdown and NPIs did not come from the Government conspiring with behavioural scientists in SPI-B, but rather from ignoring them. Not only that, they say fear is an ineffective way to persuade people engage in ‘health protective behaviours’.
This article stuck in the craw after the extensive research I had undertaken for my book A State of Fear: How the U.K. Government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t deny the Government’s own agency in using fear but to claim it was at odds with official scientific advice is patently untrue.
The article opens with the shocking leaked Government WhatsApp messages in which the former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock openly proposed using fear — “we must frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain” — and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case agreed that “the fear/guilt factor vital”, offering lurid insight into their base and disrespectful attitude towards the British people.
But was it right for Reicher et al. to claim the Government acted against its own scientific advice? Or did these embarrassing leaks happen to offer an excellent opportunity for SPI-B members to distance themselves from the egregious use of fear?
The professors’ article then went on to use a hard-hitting article which appeared in the Telegraph in May 2021 to further back up the idea that it was the Government which aimed to control the public through fear. Well, I have a little insight into that article, since every single quote came from the anonymous interviews I conducted with government advisers, including some of their colleagues on SPI-B. One told me that “the way we have used fear is dystopian”. Another crowed that “without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon… Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually”. And yet another adviser told me that he was “stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology”. These were Reicher et al.’s contemporaries and colleagues — not the Government — breaking cover to express their discomfort and concerns.
If my first concern with this article was the flagrant denial of the advice contained within the infamous SPI-B document ‘Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures‘ published on March 22nd 2020 to increase the level of personal threat felt by the complacent, my second significant concern was the astonishing idea that the authors could “leave aside the ethical and political dimensions of this argument”. How can psychologists leave aside the ethical dimensions of using fear, whether for an article or advising Government and drafting the plans in the first place?
Professor Ellen Townsend and I decided to write a response to challenge these claims. We could not write a rapid response in the BMJ since we would have been limited to 600 words. Hence, 13 months later, a more substantive peer-reviewed article — a form of ‘response’ — has been published in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy with co-authors Professors Gemma Ahearne, Robert Dingwall, Lucy Easthope and Michael Riordan, ‘The Three Rs of Fear Messaging in a Global Pandemic: Recommendations, Ramifications and Remediation‘.
In our paper we lay out the evidence that SPI-B did support the use of fear messaging, contrary to existing psychological and disaster planning literature. Furthermore, it was never possible to simply target the ‘complacent’, who were not defined and were in fact doing a reasonable job of assessing their own risk. Consequently, the entire population was subject to fear messaging, with all of its damaging consequences.
SPI-B did recommend the use of fear. Not only that, even if it had not recommended fear, note that it did not criticise the Government’s campaign of fear in any of its members’ frequent turns in the media spotlight. The committee lay the ethical dimensions to one side. Psychologists actively proposing the use of fear should not leave aside ethics. Indeed, they are bound by ethical codes of conduct. If they disagreed with such fear messaging they had many opportunities — as well as arguably moral and professional obligations — to object on public record to the mass evocation of fear and the ensuing harms. This is, in fact, why some SPI-B advisers broke cover to speak with me for my book research.
On January 6th 2021, retired NHS psychologist Dr. Gary Sidley wrote to the British Psychological Society (BPS) about the unethical use of strategies to gain mass compliance, including fear, scapegoating and covert nudging.
One of the ‘Statement of Values’ in the BPS Code of Ethics & Conduct (2018) (12), stipulates:
3.1 Psychologists value the dignity and worth of all persons, with sensitivity to the dynamics of perceived authority or influence over persons and peoples and with particular regard to people’s rights.
In applying these values, Psychologists should consider: … consent … self-determination.
3.3 Psychologists value their responsibilities … to the general public … including the avoidance of harm and the prevention of misuse or abuse of their contribution to society.
The use of fear causes harms. Even if lives are potentially saved by calibrating the risk of death where people have underestimated risk, there are harms to mental and physical health by amplifying fear. Furthermore, the British public had an exaggerated understanding of the risks. One survey in July 2020 found that the British public thought 6-7% of the population had died from coronavirus, which was around 100 times the actual death rate.
So, given the negative ramifications, issues with effectiveness and ethical concerns, why did the SPI-B advisors recommend raising the perceived threat among the ‘complacent’? This is not addressed in the article by Reicher et al.
Among many reasons, realistically, one could be that the fears felt by psychologists themselves advising the Government affected the quality of professional advice. One SPI-B advisor told me under cover of anonymity for A State of Fear that “psychologists tend to be more on the neurotic end of the spectrum”.
Sometimes this was all too obvious. Implying that Boris Johnson should delay the road map, SPI-B’s Professor Stephen Reicher tweeted in the run-up to the original Freedom Day of June 21st:
What sort of sign does he want? The Thames turned to blood? A plague of frogs? Writing on the wall that spells out ‘we are all doomed if you don’t stop your dithering’? But seriously, what sort of sign does he want?
No Biblical scale event followed Freedom Day.
Also in June 2021, Professor Susan Michie argued on Channel 5 that face coverings and social distancing measures should continue “forever”, comparing the behaviours to routine ones such as wearing seat belts and picking up dog poo. Face coverings make little to no difference to the spread of respiratory flu-like illnesses and COVID-19 according to this Cochrane review. The idea that we might wear them forever despite the many harms, but for little to no benefit is deranged.
Later in December 2021, amidst calls that another lockdown was needed, Professor Robert West, tweeted:
It is now a near certainty that the U.K. will be seeing a hospitalisation rate that massively exceeds the capacity of the NHS. Many thousands of people have been condemned to death by the Conservative Government.
In fact, the U.K. never came close to SAGE’s projected deaths of 600 to 6,000 a day, or exceeding NHS capacity.
These professors should not be singled out for experiencing fear during the pandemic, nor for performing something of a volte face about the strategies deployed to combat COVID-19. Incidences such as these are now coming hard and fast. Just this week, in a notably mind-blowing example of amnesia, presenter Susanne Reid confessed on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, “Looking back I think we failed our children during the pandemic”. (This was in response to the news that school closures during COVID-19 mean that GCSE results will be poorer in England well into the 2030s. The impact on education and as well as mental health was predicted by experts at the time.) Yet at the time, GMB asked viewers a number of times whether schools should lock down, posing polls on Twitter, and interviewing Zero Covid fanatics who pushed this totally destructive idea. (Remember we don’t have Zero Covid now, and we never will. If they had had their way, we’d still be locked down, masked up, and schools closed.)
Over the coming years, expect to hear many more people say they never supported Zero Covid, lockdowns, the Rule of Six, school closures, tiers, cancelling Christmas or face coverings.
During the period of the COVID-19 Inquiry, no one should be immune from self-reflection. Those involved in advising Government should consider their ethics, biases and cognitive dissonance.
This article was first published on Laura’s Substack page the Free Mind. Subscribe here.
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So there are people who really believed that waste, carefully sorted into the appropriate recycle bin, wasn’t just dumped on the trash pile with all the other rubbish.
There isn’t a market to re-use all the recycling that we do. Thats why cardboard recycling bins have disappeared from many supermarkets and we send plastic to be buried in holes in Romania and China, and burn the rest. Meanwhile everything you buy is dramatically over packed, especially food. All that work to save the planet, wasted. It did sound good, and lots of people self-esteem grew at the thought that washing out bean tins was actually achieving something…
..one of my favourites…swedes wrapped in plastic!!?
..yes, you have to wonder why a lot of people don’t think, at all, beyond the ‘message’
..they seem to be baffled by the slightest thing…
..besides just being interested in stuff……it’s like natural curiosity has practically disappeared…
“‘We should celebrate healthy young women cutting off their breasts?’
Should we celebrate bulemics..? Or self harmers. Not every humans actions should be celebrated. In the whole ‘Be Kind’ thing, we have lost the sense of the boundaries of socially acceptability. Where is the shame? Where is the stigma..? Wrongly translated into ‘hate’, thats where.
There are many girls around the world eager to go through the pain of genital “cutting” in order to fulfill their true identity as members of their culture… the hypocrisy of our elites in condemning that and yet performing far greater mutilation AND lifelong medication against the true values of the culture (as represented by parents) is reprehensible.
“Council effectively bankrupt after losing millions to solar farm cheat”
Why do bureaucrats think they can run businesses. Bins and pot-holes are the limit of what we should let them get involved with.
“The Prime Minister is finding out it’s not easy being green”
For sure the push back on ‘green’ is going to be difficult. It has become embedded in many peoples thinking, and its sudden collapse as it hits reality will be hard to take.
However, continuing on with it, when it can now be seen as and expensive and useless folly is by far the more difficult. This is when a Government needs a leader with balls. Its not Sunak, and its not Starmer.
This is precisely why I’ve never understood anybody who likes Trump. 2mins of why the guy is an absolute bloody tosser.
https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1686546354993238016
He was rubbish on covid and failed to build the wall. Flaky. But waaaay better than Clinton would have been or Biden has been. I know that’s not saying much. I wouldn’t say I “like” him but he represented a departure from the uniparty politics of recent decades in the US. I think that was a pretty important step for them. He executed poorly because of his character flaws. I would much rather see De Santis get the nod and become POTUS but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, at least not this time. Trump appeals to voters. I would take him any day of the week against whoever runs for the Dems.
Well unlike yourself and others, ”Never forgive, never forget” means something to me and works across the board, no concessions. And if you are a leader of a country and have the final say so on making drastic decisions that will irreparably ( in many cases ) change or ruin millions of lives, then you get to take accountability for your actions and take the fall for that. No wriggling off the hook, no excuses, it was your call. Sweden held strong, why couldn’t Trump? Why couldn’t Johnson? Anyone minimizing the extent of the damage these f*ckwits have done or giving them an excuse when the buck stopped with them is part of the problem. I will never stop holding the various leaders responsible for their crimes against humanity. it really is as black and white as that as far as I’m concerned.
I’m not sure I am making much of a concession. I don’t know how I’d vote were I to be in the US and he was the Republican choice. Tricky one. Certainly his performance on covid was reprehensible. I was just pointing out why people “like” him.
Does that include Robert F Kennedy Jr?
Good question
I don’t know enough to say and his party is a huge source of damage to our civilisation but he deserves a very close look for sure
…he’s a perfect example of what I am saying….he is good on so many issues …..but is now taking a great deal of flack after appearing on a programme with a (not my words) rabidly pro-Israeli commentator…where RFK said he backed Israel completely and made a comment to the effect of …Israel only attack military targets..never civilians…
As you can imagine this has not gone down well with a lot of people….
As I said..we often have to choose the ‘least bad’ option….!?
There’s never a perfect option
The Tories have crossed many lines for me with Covid, net zero and mass immigration so they no longer meet minimum standards, JFK and Trump might
I don’t like Trump as a person – he is a narcissist and misogynistic, among a number of major character flaws. And the video you posted demonstrates his narcissism very well – he just can’t admit that he got it hugely wrong on the vaccines. But so have millions of others – you and I personally know supposedly intelligent people who still believe the vaccines saved millions of lives.
I do think he has many qualities that make him a potentially very good President. He is strong on law and order, the economy, energy, immigration, woke stuff, free speech, anti-war – he genuinely (IMO) wants to make America great again and cares about making lives better. He also has the proverbial balls to take on the Establishment (including the Deep State and military industrial complex), which is a clear and present danger to us all.
There are no amount of redeeming features that can ever negate what that man did once he gave the go-ahead to lock down his country, deprive kids of education and social contact, ruin small businesses and on and on the list goes…Then the infamous ”Operation Warp Speed”. It must be a nice fact that keeps him warm at night knowing he’s killed more Americans than the Vietnam war ever did. Zero forgiveness, that man has a LOT of blood on his hands, but evidently America is full of people suffering Stockholm Syndrome.
On lockdowns, I read your separate post about Michael Senger’s excellent piece, in which he says:
“[The view of the response to COVID as having been driven primarily by the western intelligence community] explains why some leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson who weren’t initially keen on lockdowns have always seemed so confused; it seems the information they were being fed by the intelligence community on COVID may have been deliberately misleading.”
He was clearly very reluctant to support lockdown but came under huge psychological pressure to recommend them. I am not sure that, in his position, I could have withstood that initial pressure (from all his advisers) to advocate lockdowns.
Also, on both lockdowns and vaccines, he was not making the final call and therefore does not technically have “blood on his hands”. Decisions on lockdowns and vaccine roll-outs were made by the governors of individual states. He was a lame-duck President in any case (having “lost” the 2020 election in November 2020) by the time the vaccines were rolled out and given their authorisations by the FDA etc.
As I said, Sweden stood their ground, so why couldn’t others? Just sounds to me like you and others are very keen in cutting Trump some slack and allowing him to wriggle off the hook. As long as he ticks boxes in other areas all will be over-looked and forgotten, eh? And I suppose Trump bears no responsibility for putting Fauci front and centre of the Covid response, giving the man a worldwide platform and elevating him to international God-like status? Yep, totally out of Trump’s hands, he was evidently completely powerless..
“And if you are a leader of a country and have the final say so on making drastic decisions that will irreparably ( in many cases ) change or ruin millions of lives, then you get to take accountability for your actions and take the fall for that.”
I hear what you say, but Trump did not have the final say on lockdowns or vaccine roll-out and he did not impose any vaccine mandates – unlike Biden. If you were to discuss greater evils, there is no doubt that the federally imposed (by Biden) vaccine mandates on public sector employees (and employees in supply chains serving US Government contracts) was much more evil than Trump’s advocacy (but not imposing) of lockdowns and vaccines.
I’m not arguing against what you are saying, but the reality is the usual choice..who is the ‘least bad’….?
That is what they are now faced with in America…(and everywhere)..
Biden was no better, and in my opinion much worse than Trump..and he didn’t overturn anything..which he could have done?
which of course doesn’t excuse Trump….….
but if everyone is in the mire…I agree with TOF, you have to look at the one that might do something about other stuff you care about….
Just the sad reality of the situation I suppose….
Must admit I’d be backing DeSantis !
Do you think he has the balls to take on the Establishment? He may even be part of the Establishment…
He is Establishment.. he’s 100% under the control of the Jewish lobby and does what he’s told.. end of!
‘removing the tap handle’ – some sort of euphemism?
Like it
Bud can’t get much lower, cheating and lieing to customers just to get rid of the weak fizzy p!ss
Excellent piece here about how the Covid response was a coup all planned by the Western intelligence community. This illustrates precisely why any world leaders; Trump, Johnson, Micron, Turdeau, all of the tyrannical b’stards, should all be being tried for crimes against humanity and banged to rights for what they did, the damage they caused, the lives they are responsible for ruining, all dressed up as their lockstepped ”Covid Response”, and yet free and entitled they will all remain because they’re untouchable.
”The response to COVID was one of the greatest peacetime policy catastrophes in history, shredding America’s international credibility, robbing children of years of their youth and education, killing millions, throwing hundreds of millions into poverty, costing billions of life years, and transferring trillions in wealth from workers to billionaires, all for nothing. That this illiberalism emanated directly from the western intelligence community explains how a catastrophe of such magnitude was able to take place.
Most of all, that the western intelligence community drove the illiberalism of the response to COVID explains why the corruption and inhumanity of that response have always seemed so obvious, with the most valuable information on the events in question often coming from leading officials’ own books and interviews, despite how much harm they caused. They’re able to operate with such impunity because they know that the only agencies that can hold them accountable are the ones behind the whole spectacle. The propaganda is obvious, and it’s meant to be.”
https://www.michaelpsenger.com/p/the-unwitting-coup-was-the-response
A very good post MOG..
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-66376464
Margaret Ferrier took a PCR test because she had a tickly throat. In displaying such stupidity she clearly disbarred herself from the rest of the stupids in Westminster. Absolutely correct in her decision not to stand again.
The Telegraph’s failure to properly report the corruption of the 2020 Presidential Election and the Covid/Vax scam was the reason I cancelled my subscription.
Looks like yet again, it goes with the flow and ignore the mountains of evidence of ballot rigging, dodgy voting machines, counting halted in the middle of the night, zero signature verification, Zuckerbucks, Chinese interference, suppression of Hunter’s laptop story.
Cowardly, crooked journalism.
Well said, NOW. I did the same for the same reasons, and also with The Spectator.
I call B.S. What we learned was that the virus affected the elderly and the vulnerable in almost exactly the same proportions as most respiratory diseases – that is to say those closest to death were most likely to die. Unlike, say, in epidemics of Ebola which is so deadly it kills old and young alike.
To try to be fair, Professor Karol Sikora (the author) does go on to point out that all but a few unfortunate kids were more-or-less unaffected by the damned bug and to excoriate the lockdown policies and their proponents.
Here’s a chart showing the percentage of all-cause deaths (expressed as rates) that were registered in England and Wales Jan 2010 – May 2023.
Note the terrible disruption to the pattern around April 2020… Oh wait. there wasn’t one.
If you are old you’re more likely to die than someone younger.
Another “vaccine” scam incoming for a ‘viral’ disease which isn’t caused by a virus…. (Check the work of Kevin Corbett, Celia Farber & Cary Mullis for this little scam)
Be warned – another pharma product one doesn’t need.
https://jp.weforum.org/videos/england-is-aiming-to-beat-hiv-by-2030
Evidence from Pfizer’s own documentation of the presence of graphene oxide in the covid bioweapon injections, despite all the denials made refuting this assertion.
One of the most recent documents published by the FDA confirms the use of Graphene Oxide in the manufacturing process of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. Proving that medicine regulators the mainstream media, Fact Checkers and Pfizer have all been lying to you.
Article: https://theleadingreport.com/2023/07/06/secret-documents-reveal-pfizer-fda-fact-checkers-lied-about-toxic-graphene-oxide-inside-the-covid-19-vaccines-2/
Document: https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/125742_S1_M4_4.2.1-vr-vtr-10741.pdf
Follow @zeeemedia
We’re the immunocompromised at a higher risk from Covid 19?
This new (limited) study concludes that …”The odds ratio for mortality was 0.66 for immunocompromised and 0.38 for immunocompetent patients in the fourth wave.”
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230205/New-research-examines-how-COVID-19-affects-immune-compromised-people.aspx
Great…. More of our money being wasted on a surveillance system to further control & contain us whilst simultaneously zapping us with health harming EMF radiation…
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/40-million-fund-launched-to-unlock-5g-benefits-across-the-uk
What a complete waste of our money. Again.
Excellent conversation between Mads Palsvig & Alex Krainer yesterday evening on the financial system & geopolitics. A really important topic for us to understand – as Mads said yesterday, until 3 years ago he knew nothing about medicine but it was vital that he learn! Learning about how the financial system is abused by the parasite class to steak wealth from a country & its people is important.
https://rumble.com/user/cbkovess
“Why is Costa celebrating top surgery?” – The corporate world has been captured by trans ideology, says James Esses in Spiked.
How is the euphemistically named ‘top surgery‘ significantly different from the widely condemned FGM?