Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists

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Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists

Members of Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour express regret about ‘unethical’ methods

By Gordon Rayner,

ASSOCIATE EDITOR 14 May 2021 • 9:00pm

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The use of fear to control behaviour in the Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, scientist group admits

15 May, 2021
Carl D. Pearson No Comments

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Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour have expressed regret about ‘unethical’ methods used to control behaviour in Covid crisis and admitted they should be considered ‘totalitarian’. Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was “unethical” and “totalitarian”. Advertisements Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s Covid-19 response. The group warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid-19 because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”. Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature, I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.”

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SPI-B is one of the sub-committees that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), led by Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser. One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.

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Another SPI-B member said: “You could call psychology ‘mind control’. That’s what we do… clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past.” One warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in”.

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