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

it or not. The management of the epidemic rested strongly on the use of the PCR test. As the Public Heath England document Understanding cycle threshold (Ct) in SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR: a guide for health protection teams says, ‘A single Ct value in the absence of clinical context cannot be relied upon for decision making about a person’s infectivity.’¹³ And as the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University said, ‘PCR detection of viruses is helpful so long as its accuracy can be understood: it offers the capacity to detect RNA in minute quantities, but whether that RNA represents infectious virus may not be clear.’¹⁴

In guidelines for NHS staff,¹⁵ the government wrote that staff who had already had Covid should be exempted from mass screening tests because ‘fragments of inactive virus can be persistently detected by PCR in respiratory tract samples following infection – long after a person has completed their isolation period and is no longer infectious.’ Think of all the people who tested positive and did self-isolate when they may no longer have been infectious. Of those, how many broke self-isolation and were punished? In November 2020, the Portuguese High Court ruled that PCR test results alone could not be used to enforce self-isolation; they must be accompanied by clinical diagnosis.¹⁶

The legal detention of healthy people is permitted by emergency laws but enabled by a narrative of dehumanisation. People who break the rules are ‘dangerous’ (they might be infectious), ‘stupid’, and ‘socially irresponsible’.

People have been instructed not to work, have relationships or touch other people. These are rules which would have sounded outlandish, cruel and impossible not long ago. The number of people attending funerals was restricted, the elderly were left unvisited in care homes, and women birthed without their partners, to give just a few examples of exceptions to the normal moral and human rights which were impeded or suspended.

Lockdown itself is prison terminology. Only wrongdoers are locked down. At least in law you are innocent until proven guilty. In our biosecurity state we are assumed infectious until proven healthy.

How do you leave the camp, the world of confinement, social distancing rules and restrictions? In time, when the government determines the epidemic has run its course? Or perhaps the answer lies in a vaccine, to be delivered en masse in 2021? The choice to take a vaccine is a marvellous modern medical blessing, as long as resuming sovereignty of your life does not mean forgoing sovereignty of your body. Beyond choice, we should be vigilant about the danger of mandation and the more subtle, but no less powerful, threat of coercion, for example by offering a return to normal civic and social life with a ‘vaccine passport’ or ‘Covid status certificate’, or double-speak ‘freedom app’.

The worst threat, mandation, would signal loss of bodily sovereignty, in the same way as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay tube-fed against his will. Coercion is more nuanced, but over time would it create a two-tier society of vaccinated ‘safe’ people and unvaccinated ‘unsafe’ people? Would the unvaccinated be considered reckless, socially irresponsible or stupid? These are values which push them further into a ‘less than’ status. Note that Matt Hancock linked ‘personal responsibility’¹⁷ with the 2021 vaccine rollout, the implication being that the choice not to vaccinate is irresponsible.

Nick Cohen wrote in The Guardian: ‘it is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated’.¹⁸ A German doctor¹⁹ called for people who refuse the vaccination to be refused hospital treatment if they become sick with Covid. This is not how national healthcare has been provided in Germany or the UK. It is available to all. Obesity is one of the key indicators of ICU treatment and death from Covid. It would be equally monstrous to propose that the overweight may not be treated in ICU, because they did not show ‘personal responsibility’ for their health.

The ‘accursed’ are less than their fellow humans. This is why it is important to always be aware of language and policy which ‘others’ and dehumanises. The media and social media have reverberated with language like ‘covidiots’, ‘selfish morons’ and ‘granny killers’. I can personally attest that peaceful protestors were wrongly characterised as ‘violent anti-lockdowners’. A study²⁰ claimed that non-mask wearers were more likely to be psychopaths. History reverberates with examples of deliberate attempts to dehumanise and divide people and it has never ended well.

So, why do governments use fear? Simply, it encourages compliance. A meta-analysis has found that messages with fear are nearly twice as effective as messages without fear.²¹ At a time when there is political disengagement, fear cuts through. How do you get your population to take heed? Scare them. Fear suppresses rational thinking and they are more likely to do what they are told.

I spoke to political scientist, Piers Robinson, about fear. He was the chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at Sheffield University, leaving in 2019 to focus on his work as co-director at the Organisation for Propaganda Studies. Piers has been ‘smeared’ for disputing the use of chemical weapons in Syria. So he has studied propaganda and also – depending on your viewpoint – been at the other end of it.

I asked if he thought governments were leveraging fear as a form of social control. He said: ‘If something very big is going on in the world, you should always ask if it can be exploited for reasons that are entirely separate from what the primary concerns appear to be. Covid is an event of such scale that there is the potential for actors to exploit it for various agendas. Never let a good crisis go to waste, and so on. You can be open-minded about both the severity of the disease and the potential for exploitation. 9/11 is an example. That event led to 20 years of warfare which wasn’t about fighting terrorism but was enabled by the ‘war on terror’ narrative. When the Chilcot report published communications between Tony Blair and George Bush and they were talking about