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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https://www.thebernician.net/papers-laid-alleging-pandemic-fraud-against-hancock-whitty-vallance-ferguson/
PCP Papers Laid Alleging Pandemic Fraud Against Hancock, Whitty, Vallance & Ferguson
At 16:23 pm this afternoon, one year after the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens’ decision to reclassify COVID-19 as no longer being considered a High Consequence Infectious Disease was published by Public Health England, the papers were laid electronically at a south London Magistrates Court, in the People’s Union of Britain’s momentous Private Criminal Prosecution against Matt Hancock, Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Neil Ferguson for pandemic fraud.
Early next week, the court will receive a 1,200 page bundle of evidence, which includes expert witness statements from two professors, three doctors, a dental surgeon, a probate solicitor, a mathematician, a retired nuclear submarine data analyst, an independent data analyst and a former CID fraud detective, who is acting as a trustee of the PUB in bringing this most serious of prosecutions to the criminal court.
Declaration SoughtIn addition to the charges of fraud by false representation and non-disclosure, in material breaches of sections 2 and 3 of the Fraud Act 2006, we are informally applying for a declaration, under the inherent powers of the court, which states that autopsies are to be carried out for all alleged COVID deaths, which will be held as evidence in the forthcoming trial, on the ground that we have expert witness testimony of the falsification of death certificates, as per UK Government policy.
We are also asking for a moratorium on the UK flu and COVID ‘vaccinations’ programmes to be declared for period of at least 90 days, in order to definitively establish whether it is COVID-19 or ‘vaccines’ that are killing people at a minimum mortality rate of 377 per 100,000 healthy adults, as per the leaked WHO approved ‘vaccine’ safety study which we are adducing into evidence.
Boatload of Prima Facie Evidence
They told us they wanted more prima facie evidence when we made the last application in late 2020, seeking the arrest of Matt Hancock for fraud by non-disclosure over the declassification of COVID-19 by the ACDP.
Well, now they have a veritable boatload of the stuff heading their way, so prepare yourselves for the inevitable shitstorm on the near horizon, after the defendants’ QC’s tell them that their only defence is to plead gross negligence. However, the evidence is so emphatic that they knew exactly what they were doing that the jury will almost certainly convict them as charged.
Nevertheless, don’t expect the defendants to be wheeled off in handcuffs to Belmarsh by tomorrow morning. Whilst it is just about conceivable that the court’s legal department could make an initial assessment of the case by the end of next week, even if it happens that swiftly, the matter will then be passed to the Chief Magistrate of the UK’s legal department, which will probably take at least another week to make their assessment.
Potential Turnaround
In the event all of that is turned around within the next two weeks, the case would then be passed to a senior district judge, who must then decide whether to grant the applications for the summonses and the declaration, whether on paper or at a hearing.
If the summons application is granted, a pleading hearing would then be listed to take place within the next couple of weeks. This would take us to 28 days from now and probably represents the earliest time that the defendants will be summonsed to plead in the Magistrates Court. The informal application for the declaration would also be dealt with at that hearing.
Given the seriousness of the charges and the urgency of the situation, with clear evidence of fraud with murderous consequences already adduced into evidence, we will then ask the court to list a trial by jury at the very earliest opportunity, which will almost certainly take place at the Old Bailey.
If and when all of that transpires rests on the judgment of a single district judge, who will necessarily have experience dealing with such serious charges. However, it is the considered opinion of the former CID fraud detective and the team behind the scenes who have supported me every step of the way that the Statement of Case is “monumental”, “truly historical” and:
PCP Papers Laid Alleging Pandemic Fraud Against Hancock, Whitty, Vallance & Ferguson
https://www.thebernician.net/papers-laid-alleging-pandemic-fraud-against-hancock-whitty-vallance-ferguson/
This means you’re doing great Europe!
Keep up the good work!
“Only 16% of the UE’s population has received the jab, compared with 52% in the UK.”
So – the corporate EU isn’t as bad as the monarchic UK :-), even given pursuit of similar objectives. I always thought Brexit was a bit of a red herring.
Note what the vaccine fanatics are now implying (courtesy Uncle Tom L. Henry) : that ethnic minority populations are a bit thick if they don’t gobble up vaccines.
A lovely boost for racism.
Racism is good when it suits Der Regime
Maybe it is supposed to go slow… we dont want the end to come to soon… not until the vaccine passport system has been developed.
#SAGE is the new STUPID
Another pro vaccine message from LS. This is only been a success in the UK by terrifying the living shit out of the whole population, and you think this is a good thing?? So who knew the people of Europe have been told the truth about the risks and think its a bit dodgy and more importantly they can see they are not at risk from a mild seasonal virus. Why are you not supporting this action and why are you taking this evil government side? THEY ARE PLANNING ON INJECTING CHILDREN FOR FUCKS SAKE. WAKE UP!
I don’t think this by published on LD is a sign of provaccine in LD.They are just publishing a news which can’t be surpressed.It will just stimulate a considered angry response.WHO and side effect of drugs? They have no idea just lead by other agencis which they pick and chose.
Read Bakhti letter again to EMA completely dismisses WHO having no clue at all in side effects.Kluge is one of the worst in WHO,sadly working in Europe,being proLD(contrary to David Nabarro another WHO director) and with this in mind no surprise at all applauding a mass vaccination of all.