How far has the corn grown? It is known that fear induces a desire for authoritarian control.6 Here in the UK, one of the cradles of democracy, fear has created the right emotional temperature for the toleration, even enthusiastic welcome, of increased surveillance, reduced rights to protest, and breaches of human rights.
The policies of the last year affected our daily lives, weakened our social bonds, and also disrupted the most intimate human rites of birth, marriage and death. We need to be cautious about policies of fear which invade our humanity. We mustn’t let a medical crisis strip us of our freedoms or our ideals.
In the introduction I said I wanted to invite you to write the end of the story. The textbook of tyrants is written in the language of coercion and cajolement. And sadly there is no mythic Happy Ever After. But you know that. The truth is that we live in a permanent prequel, as the story always goes on. The way to change the story is simply to believe in our power to change it.
We seem to have forgotten that no one is safe. You have never been safe and you never will be. Nor will I. In the blind global panic of an epidemic we have forgotten how to analyse risk. If you don’t accept that you will die one day, that you can never be safe, then you are a sitting duck for authoritarian policies which purport to be for your safety. If too many individuals immolate their liberty for safety, we risk a bonfire of freedoms.
Nudge undermines free will; it removes our choices without us even knowing. If we continue to allow ourselves to be nudged towards a greater good, we have given up on determining what ‘good’ looks like. The weaponisation of fear undermines democracy, liberty and humanity. Nudge is not ‘fair play’.
The use of behavioural psychology and specifically the weaponisation of fear were symptoms of a government that had given up on trust and transparency. If we truly believe in freedom we must also believe we deserve it. Personal responsibility is not a conduit to danger. Let us reject living in a state of fear. As we recover from an epidemic, we must also recover the trust and transparency that we deserve.
APPENDIX 1
DATA
The UK Government began its attempts to increase and generalise fear at the end of March 2020. Although risk was highly patterned, the public health messaging was designed to expand risks so the entire population felt threatened. The risk of dying from Covid might be smaller and also more age-specific than you imagined.
US CENTRES FOR DISEASE CONTROL
‘Current best estimates’ of the infection fatality rate (IFR)1
0-17 years
0.002%
18-49 years
0.05%
50-64 years
0.6%
65+ years
9%
IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON
Report 34 - COVID-19 infection fatality ratio estimates from seroprevalence2 from Imperial College London concluded that ‘We find that age-specific IFRs follow an approximately log-linear pattern, with the risk of death doubling approximately every eight years of age.’
0-4 years
0.00%
5-9 years
0.01%
10-14 years
0.01%
15-19 years
0.02%
20-24 years
0.03%
25-29 years
0.04%
30-34 years
0.06%
35-39 years
0.10%
40-44 years
0.16%
45-49 years
0.24%
50-54 years
0.38%
55-59 years
0.60%
60-64 years
0.94%
65-69 years
1.47%
70-74 years
2.31%
75-79 years
3.61%
80-84 years
5.66%
85-89 years
8.86%
90+ years
17.37%
WORLD HEATH ORGANIZATION
The WHO published Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data3 by Professor John P.A. Ioannidis. The report says that:
‘Covid-19 has a very steep age gradient for risk of death. Moreover, in European countries that have had large numbers of cases and deaths, and in the USA, many, and in some cases most, deaths occurred in nursing homes.
Locations with many nursing home deaths may have high estimates of the infection fatality rate, but the infection fatality rate would still be low among non-elderly, non-debilitated people… The median infection fatality rate across all 51 locations was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%)… For people younger than 70 years old, the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 across 40 locations with available data ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% (median 0.05%); the corrected values were similar.’
APPENDIX 2
LOCKDOWNS DON’T WORK
This is a book about fear, not about the efficacy of non-pharmaceutical interventions, namely lockdowns. But lockdowns would probably not have been accepted in the first place, nor tolerated for so long, without the weaponisation of fear. You have to be more frightened of a virus and the consequences of ignoring the mandate to stay at home, than you do of losing your livelihood, income, or real-life human connections.
You might think all the UK government’s policies were worth it if they worked. Of course, you might not, and I would argue that the consideration of how we became a state of fear can be and should be separate to whether lockdowns work or not. These are extricable issues. The use of fear to encourage adherence to lockdown rules has its own merits and demerits. Your attitude towards a strong state, the use of behavioural psychology and the leveraging of fear will be ideological to some degree. Sadly, I would also argue that belief in the success or failure of lockdown is also ideological to some degree, because belief in the effectiveness of lockdowns does not seem to be based in firm, unequivocal empirical evidence, as I will demonstrate here.
There have been unqualified assumptions in the media that the differences in case and death rates in different countries are explained by lockdowns and interventions such as masks. But this falls into ‘Illusion of Control’ thinking as well as being, frankly, lazy thinking. And it suits governments to perpetuate the idea that lockdowns work, since they have enacted them.
I may or may not persuade you that lockdowns do not work. The jury may even
