Is this a case of the government capitalising on disaster? Matt Hancock said in September 2019 that the government was ‘looking very seriously’5 at making vaccinations mandatory for school pupils. Is Covid-19 being used as the excuse to usher in a change that the government already wanted? He said at the time that ‘when the state provides services to people then it’s a two-way street – you’ve got to take your responsibilities, too’. But this is autocratic thinking in disguise, where ‘responsibility’ means doing what you are told. He said he thought that ‘the public would back us’. I think that would have been unlikely at the time, as it would have been a huge change for the British socially, ethically and legally. But there’s nothing like a pandemic for shifting the dial on mandatory vaccines. Indeed, in March 2021, Hancock announced that the government was looking at making Covid-19 vaccines mandatory for care workers, to the consternation of unions who attacked the plans as ‘heavy-handed’ and ‘authoritarian’.6
During the epidemic, public opinion polls functioned like crystal balls, allowing us to gaze at the plans of politicians. While polls are ostensibly supposed to tell the government what we think, they are quite useful for telling us what the government wants us to think and what it wants to do next. And when the results are revealed to us they guide us, through social conformity and the herding instinct, into a preference we never knew we held. As Peter Hitchens said, ‘Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it. Crack that, and it all makes sense.’7 In an IPSOS MORI report, David Halpern made a similar comment: ‘In a world of behavioural economics, public opinion surveys are themselves a “nudge” – a signal to both policymakers and our fellow citizens about what’s acceptable and what’s not.’8
On 30 September 2020 YouGov asked, ‘Once a vaccine has been found, would you support or oppose the government making it compulsory for everyone to receive a vaccination against the coronavirus?’ The options allowed you to support, oppose or select ‘don’t know’. That question was a fairly clear indication of the government’s direction of travel at a time when emergency authorisation of a vaccine had not even been granted in the UK. The next question hinted harder at the desired destination: ‘And once a vaccine has been found, would you support or oppose the government prosecuting and fining people who do not get a vaccination against the coronavirus?’ Before the vaccine had been authorised, long before we would know whether the vaccine interrupted transmission of the virus (that is still not certain at the time of writing) the government was checking to see whether the public would support fines for not having the vaccine.
Just as Hancock’s pre-epidemic enthusiasm for mandating vaccines mirrors his post-epidemic interest, might the government’s flip-flopping on vaccine passports also align with a previous inclination for such schemes? The European Union published a Roadmap For The Implementation Of Actions By The European Commission Based On The Commission Communication And The Council Recommendation On Strengthening Cooperation Against Vaccine Preventable Diseases9 which proposed countering vaccine hesitancy, and the development of a common EU vaccination card between 2019 and 2021, to be followed by a ‘vaccination card/passport for EU citizens’ that is ‘compatible with electronic immunisation information systems and recognised for use across borders’ by 2022. Well, that seems to be remarkably on schedule.
Fear has created a morality play where heavy-handed discussions about society-wide vaccine mandates and Covid certificates, or vaccine passports, are privileged over personal responsibility and risk. Does your Happy Ending involve personal responsibility or state mandates? In the desperate desire to end the Horrible Story of the Covid-19 pandemic we are rushing towards a conclusion without being certain enough of our values.
The minister entrusted with reviewing the use of Covid certificates is Michael Gove. As he once said, ‘Once powers are yielded to the state at moments of crisis or emergency, it’s very rarely the case that the state hands them back.’10 It will be interesting to see whether the spirit of those words influences the review.
19. MAKING SURE IT NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN
The argument in favour of using fear to command and coerce people during a crisis cannot be justified when we consider the ethics, the collateral damage, and the impact on recovery. How did it work so well? Could fear have taken such a hold if the terrain was not fertile?
In a prescient 2007 article,1 sociologist, author and fear expert Frank Furedi wrote:
‘Fear plays a key role in twenty-first century consciousness. Increasingly, we seem to engage with various issues through a narrative of fear. You could see this trend emerging and taking hold in the last century, which was frequently described as an “Age of Anxiety”. But in recent decades, it has become more and better defined, as specific fears have been cultivated.
The rise of catchphrases such as the politics of fear, fear of crime and fear of the future is testimony to the cultural significance of fear today. Many of us seem to make sense of our experiences through the narrative of fear. Fear is not simply associated with high-profile catastrophic threats such as terrorist attacks, global warming, AIDS or a potential flu pandemic; rather, as many academics have pointed out, there are also the ‘quiet fears’ of everyday life.’
Furedi notes that fear is often said to be the defining cultural mood in contemporary society. These fears have led to the ascendancy of public health and safetyism and the heavy leaning on the precautionary principle. The terrain could not have been better ploughed and prepared to grow fear in an epidemic.
History shows us that mass delusions will come and go. Are we particularly susceptible to fear and mass delusions now? When I interviewed psychologist Patrick Fagan, he told me
