The Telegraph 20210514 Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists.pdf

Ministers have been accused of ramping up the threat from the pandemic to justify lockdowns CREDIT: Andrew Matthews/PA

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.
“The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment.
Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”
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”.
Another said: “Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon… Psychology has had a really
good epidemic, actually.”
As well as overt warnings about the danger of the virus, the Government has been accused of
feeding the public a non-stop diet of bad news, such as deaths and hospitalisations, without ever
putting the figures in context with news of how many people have recovered, or whether daily
death tolls are above or below seasonal averages.
Another member of SPI-B said they were "stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural
psychology" during the pandemic, and that “psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped