SAGE Advisors Blame COVID ‘Strategy of Fear’ on Government

A sign asking people to stay at home stands on the sea front in Southend, England, on Jan. 08, 2021. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Behavioural scientists who played a crucial role in devising COVID-19 interventions said the UK government tried to control the public through the use of fear and denied exaggerating risks and fear levels themselves.

Writing for the British Medical Journal, behavioral scientists who delivered advice on social and behavioural interventions during COVID-19 have accused the government of pushing a “naïve and mistaken strategy of fear.”

Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) was one of the sub-committees that advised the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), which was tasked with advising the government about how to maximise the impact of its pandemic communications strategy.

In May 2021, The Telegraph reported that SPI-B members, quoted in Laura Dodsworth’s book “A State of Fear,”  had expressed regret about “unethical” methods, with one psychologist Gavin Morgan saying: “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.”

In the BMJ article, SPI-B members Susan Michie, Stephen Reicher, John Drury, and Robert West wrote that “the UK government’s attempt to frighten people into COVID-19 protective behaviours was at odds with its scientific advice.”

They said, “advice was to engage with the public and focus on supporting them in doing the right thing rather than assume they need frightening and coercing in order to stop them from doing the wrong thing.”

The BMJ article pointed to “among the many revelations from recent leaked UK Government WhatsApp messages published by The Daily Telegraph is the fact that Matt Hancock, former health secretary, proposed using fear in order to get the public to comply with COVID-19 restrictions.”

In December 2020, Hancock wrote that “we must frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain.”

The Epoch Times has not been able to independently verify the texts from The Daily Telegraph’s article.

“These revelations seem to confirm what many had been arguing for two years: that the UK government aimed to control the public through use of fear,” SPI-B members wrote in the BMJ article.

Britain's Health Secretary Matt Hancock speaks during a coronavirus media briefing in Downing Street in London, Britain, on May 27, 2021. (Matt Dunham/AP Photo, Pool, File)

Persuasion, Rather Than Fear

The SPI-B group said that it was asked to report on options for “increasing adherence to social distancing measures where it said that one of these options was about ”persuasion,” rather than fear.

One of the options was that: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.”

They said that this option was to make sure that people “have a realistic appraisal of the risks they face and that they are empowered to address those risks.”

“To suggest that this is, in any sense, seeking to control people, is nonsense. Not only is it based on sound science; arguably it is plain common sense,” they added.

A man is seen wearing a face mask amid the COVID-19 virus pandemic in Sheffield, England, on Oct. 22, 2020. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

SPI-B members often expressed opinions on COVID-19 restrictions on news channels. Some examples included recommending systems whereby all public spaces were required to indicate their “clean air” status and saying that the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions was like building new “variant factories.”

Susan Michie, who co-wrote the BMJ article, told The Epoch Times by email as “always, words need to be taken in context in order to understand what they mean and their intent.”

Michie requested that The Epoch Times use her quote in full.

“The context includes the stage of the vaccination (pre-vaccination), the rest of the report in which specific quotes set, and the other relevant reports at the time,” she said.

“The advice was, as with any public health threat, to address complacency with messaging by giving an accurate understanding of the risk and crucially to show how people can act to address the risk. This is exactly the same as Governments and public health experts do with smoking, alcohol, and other public health issues,” she said.

Michie said that it “is inaccurate and defamatory to claim that we advised to exaggerate the risk.”

Michie,  a longstanding member of the Communist Party and Director of UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, referred to a widely reported segment when she told Channel 5 News that “masks should be worn forever” which she said was taken out of context.

“An example of words being taken out of context with malicious intent is to leave out the words ’to some extent' after me responding to an interviewer that we may need to wear masks forever,” she said.

“Had the interviewer not cut me off after saying “to some extent” I would have explained that the extent depends on the prevalence and virulence of a pandemic at a particular point of time, the vulnerabilities of particular populations people are mixing with (e.g. patients) and the extent to which mitigations such as effective vaccination and good ventilation or air filtration are available,” she added.

Michie is also the chair of the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health.

‘Unethical and Incredibly Unprofessional’

Clinical Psychologist Dr. Damian Wilde has been critical of the use of psychological tactics in the COVID-19 communications strategy.

Wilde is a member of HART, which was set up by medical and health professionals to share concerns about policy and guidance recommendations relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“‘Hard-hitting emotional messaging,’ how is that not trying to control people?” said Wilde.

“This is control at a psychological level and as a health psychologist, Michie will have known full well what the impact such unethical communications would have,” he added.

In March, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak defended an official COVID-19 inquiry as the “right way” to scrutinise the handling of the pandemic.

“It seems clear to me that members of SPI-B are now getting worried and feel threatened by the WhatsApp scandal and the COVID inquiry and are merely trying to cover their tracks,” said Wilde.

“I spoke about the potential harms to lockdowns and fear messaging over two years ago and Michie et al. need to face up to the part they played in purposely frightening people, which for a psychologist to do is unethical and incredibly unprofessional,” he added.

People wearing face masks walk through the shopping area in the city centre of Manchester, England, on Oct. 8, 2020. (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)

‘Simple Common Sense’

Stephen Reicher, who co-wrote the BMJ article, told The Epoch Times by email that he is “not at all nervous or ‘running scared’” because he “never argued for fear and indeed consistently argued (and published) that an effective COVID response depends upon respecting and engaging with people so as to build trust.”

The Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews said that in many ways, he was “surprised that people find this difficult or confuse it with a strategy of fear. It is simple common sense.”

He added that those who still argue that “we were totalitarians advocating fear do it by taking one sentence out of context” from  SPI-B’s “perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased” option.

He said there was a broader context and argument across “nearly all the SPI-B papers” that was “about respecting and engaging with the public.”

“In our research and in our advice, we respect the ability of people to think for themselves and reason sensibly if you are open and clear, giving them the information and the resources they need to make (and act on) decisions,” he said.

“I invite our critics to read SPI-B papers and to read our research. They will be surprised by what they find and may even be led to challenge some of their own assumptions,” added Reicher.

Matt Hancock told The Epoch Times by email, “There is absolutely no public interest case for this huge breach. All the materials for the book have already been made available to the Inquiry, which is the right, and only, place for everything to be considered properly and the right lessons to be learned. As we have seen, releasing them in this way gives a partial, biased account to suit an anti-lockdown agenda.”

The Cabinet Office have not responded to a request for comment.