A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic, Laura Dodsworth [the two towers ebook .txt] 📗

77th Brigade and spoke to Major Bruce Weston who handles media enquiries. He was very friendly and very slick and, unsurprisingly, wouldn’t directly answer my questions. I referenced the many negative comments about the 77th on Twitter and he did acknowledge that ‘what you will get from Twitter is the perception that the 77th is people sat behind computers dealing with cyber’.

He did tell me that the 77th ‘have provided a small team from the information and outreach unit, and are supporting the Rapid Response Unit’. I asked how exactly and he retorted that I would ‘have to ask the Cabinet Office’. But do their policies permit direct engagements with British citizens to attack their views on social media, I wondered? ‘We are part of the 6th Division of the army,’ he said, ‘and we are bound by policies and frameworks that all parts of the army will work within.’ I approached the Cabinet Office as he suggested and got precisely nowhere.

Humans are naturally excellent at some forms of identification. We recognise sex, for instance. Obviously that’s handy from an evolutionary perspective. We also recognise inauthenticity in language and communication. A sad fact of social media is that it is now littered with accounts that appear to be ‘bots’ or deceptive accounts of some kind. Bots are automated accounts, running on code, and can be bought in bulk for covert use. Subtle linguistic clues can give them away. Deceptive accounts, troll accounts (like the Chinese ‘50c army’) are more intensive and expensive to operate as they are run by humans. Their giveaways are ‘eggs’ and handles with weird names composed of numbers (as with bots), also accounts who engage with others but people don’t initiate communication with them, and timelines which are ‘one note’. Are some of these run by the 77th? We have no idea.

SAGE AND SPI-B

SAGE is the team of advisers that coordinates scientific advice given to the Cabinet Office decision-makers who attend COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms) meetings. (Don’t those acronyms sound impressive? I think we are meant to deduce that SAGE members are wise and COBRA can strike like a snake.) The government will ask questions of SAGE which then coordinates the advice and answers from across multi-disciplinary experts drawn from academia, government and industry.

The SAGE team is the spearhead of three sub-teams working together: New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG); Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B).

SPI-B is the team of behavioural scientists and academic specialists in health psychology, social psychology, anthropology and history, which provides ‘behavioural science advice aimed at anticipating and helping people adhere to interventions that are recommended by medical or epidemiological experts’.25

SPI-B is not tasked with assessing which interventions are effective or analysing the data ingests, but purely with advice to encourage people to adhere to the law and guidance.

To start with, the membership of SAGE was secret, purportedly due to national security. It’s worth noting that there have been many criticisms of the make-up of both SAGE and SPI-B. Remarkably, SAGE does not include disaster recovery specialists, and there is a lack of expertise on risk management and the psychology of risk.

Did the government hide behind the phrase ‘following the science’? Did they hide behind the unelected psychocrats?

JANE, 68

I’ve had anxiety before, but nothing like this. I would try and talk myself down, but a deep part of my brain was telling me I was in terrible danger. It has felt like a bad dream.

The first couple of days of lockdown I was very nervy and scared, I had a cloak of anxiety over my shoulders. To start with I thought it would be six weeks of lockdown, we were in it together and we’d be alright. I think a lot of us felt the same. It’s how it was told to us.

I’d put the news on as soon as I got up in the morning. I don’t know if the media peddle the bad news because they think it attracts us, but I watched every day hoping for good news, something that would make me feel a little less bleak. It never came. I don’t put the news on in the morning any more.

Every single feed said we were going to die. Sky News was the worst. There were so many gruesome headlines that came at you thick and fast. There were Ferguson’s predictions that 500,000 would die. Graphs have completely lost their meaning. I watched every Downing Street briefing. There was one press briefing when they talked about a vaccine, and the one about dexamethasone. They were the only two things that I can remember. All the dreadful ones have just merged.

I can’t understand why no one talks about how many people have recovered? People would have loved headlines about recovery.

A tipping point for me was Boris Johnson’s first unlocking speech. I thought, ‘Jesus, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen.’ After that, I could feel my mood going down.

One morning I woke up with my whole body in a state of shock. I was trembling from head to foot and I had a shushing noise in my ears. My whole body felt in a state of agitation. I was dizzy when I got up, I nearly fainted. My pulse was regularly over 100 and my blood pressure was high. I thought I must have Parkinson’s or MS or something, but it was anxiety. It’s hard to believe anxiety made me feel so terrible.

For weeks, I was like this every morning. Most symptoms would begin to resolve by the evening and I’d hope I would be OK the next day, but the following morning there they all were again. I would stay in bed or on the sofa all day.

I grew up in the Cold War. We had ads on TV showing houses being blown away. But it wasn’t as constant as Covid, we weren’t talking about it all the time. Now we have adverts about