A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic

by Laura Dodsworth

  People who questioned the use of lockdown were sometimes labelled ‘lockdown sceptics’. Being sceptical can be seen as a positive attribute, which is probably why the terminology shifted to ‘Covid denier’. This reframing made people seem silly rather than sceptical, as though they denied the existence of the virus, rather than questioned public health policies. The word ‘denier’ conjures the callousness of 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 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 Public Health England. I presume that it wouldn’t do, in his position, to publicly undermine his country’s mask laws.

  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 De
claration 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 out’ of approving professional circles. But were we all scapegoated in some way?

  The government imposed many restrictions on the population to control the spread of Covid and used fear, among other tactics, to encourage compliance. Yet one of the chief ways people caught Covid was in hospitals, which is beyond the responsibility of the population. A SAGE paper14 claimed that a staggering 40.5% of Covid infections in the first wave were caught in hospital. Between the beginning of the ‘second wave’ in September 2020 and 13 January 2021, over 25,000 people15 caught Covid while in hospital, but this may be an underestimate due to the limitations of the data available. The NHS was resolutely tight-lipped about hospital-acquired infections.