A Campaign of Fearmongering Propaganda.
13 months on from the start of the pandemic, many people are still scared. They are terrified to venture beyond the supermarket or bump into a passerby. Many more haven’t been back to their office, college or place of worship. Some are even jogging with face masks. It’s sad. They are debilitated with fear and anxiety. Afraid to live as normal.
I am not a virologist, an immunologist or a doctor. However, as a communication and advertising professional, I see this ‘pandemic’ for what it is: a global outbreak of fearmongering propaganda.
There is no doubt that governments across the world have made people more fearful of COVID-19 by deliberately ramping up their sense of personal threat. Only a few weeks ago, the author Frederick Forsyth accused the UK government of waging a ‘campaign of mass fear’ against the British public. So, I am not alone. It’s just a pity that no-one in the marketing and advertising industry is speaking out. In fact, the silence from these sectors is unacceptable. It is complicity.
A 360-degree Campaign of Fear
Since March 2020, the threat of dying from COVID-19 is the most aggressively marketed product. A 360-degree campaign of fear. It is virtually impossible to turn on a TV or smartphone without being bombarded with big red statistics on deaths, hospitalisations and ‘cases’, or interrupted by one emotive vignette after the other. News stories blur into public information campaigns, and public information campaigns blur into news reports.
In the UK, campaigns such as ‘Stay At Home’, ‘Stay Alert, Control the Virus, Save Lives’ and ‘Hands. Face. Space’ literally popped up everywhere as part of a comprehensive awareness campaign about COVID-19. It’s been an unprecedented ad blitz across TV, print and social media. Increasingly, the only message heard is the one provided by government. Traditionally, this type of state media is called ‘propaganda’ which is a term that certainly applies here.
This is no tinfoil-wrapped conspiracy theory. The UK government was the leading advertiser in the UK in 2020. With an ad splurge of close to £164m, it outspent advertising behemoths like Unilever and Sky with ‘public information campaigns’ to control the spread of the virus. This ad spent was topped up by Public Health England (the NHS), who also appeared in the UK’s top 10 advertiser list. This spending bonanza was repeated by almost every government across the globe.
Naturally there was genuine fear a year ago. From the moment on March 11th 2020, when the World Health Organization declared that an outbreak of the viral disease COVID-19 had reached the level of a global pandemic, we were all scared. Shitless. Streets emptied and suddenly we were living in a dystopian film. We accepted the urgent and draconian actions by government to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. The temporary loss of our freedoms was a small price to pay. Stay Home. Stay Safe. Yes, no problem. We’re In This Together.
This initial response to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 was justifiable. However by May 2020, the first ‘curve had flattened’, and it was clear that COVID-19 was not the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, or as lethal as cardiovascular disease or cancer. Nobody was keeling over and dropping dead on the street like some of the early clips from Wuhan. Similarly, the apocalyptic predictions of Prof Neil Ferguson, and his team at Imperial College London, were not materialising. The solid data from real-world transmission studies, not models, was showing a less terrifying situation.
Despite the sharp decline in coronavirus mortality and hospitalisation in the summer of 2020, the UK government dialled up the fearmongering and doubled-down on the lockdowns. When the eminent doctors and scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration and the World Doctors Alliance called for ‘Focussed Protection’, and an end to the disproportionate restrictions, they were demonised. Experts like Dolores Cahill, Sunetra Gupta, Sucharit Bhakdi, Carl Heneghan and Robert Kennedy Jr. were banished to the Digital Gulag. As too was anyone who questioned the narrative. Common sense and decades of peer-reviewed science was simply binned. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this has affected the debate on the coronavirus response. Namely, there isn’t one. Sceptics, like me, have been dismissed as ‘granny killers‘, ‘covid-deniers’, ‘wappies’ or crazy ‘conspiracy theorists’.
Covert Psychological Strategies
In reality, the conspiracy fact is that the UK government is using teams of psychologists and behavioural scientists to deliberately ramp up fear in the population. Evidence shows that ministers have used ‘covert psychological strategies’ to terrify people into compliance with the regulations. The behavioural science sub-group of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) advised: “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened… The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”
These covert tactics to keep the public scared are also used by other governments. In Germany, the Ministry of the Interior hired scientists to ‘induce corona fear’ in order to foster acceptance for the drastic corona measures — and in Ireland, leaked documents disclose that its Independent Scientific Advocacy Group (I.S.A.G.) were instructed to “look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty.”
Who knows what other nations are using behavioural scientists to stoke up fear? Who knows if any of this is ethical? Or if anyone has considered how these campaigns using “hard-hitting emotional messaging” will leave many of our fellow citizens debilitated with fear, anxiety and worse for years to come. No wonder many people are still petrified to shake hands or return to their workplace. Never mind the children who have lost a year of their childhood, their education and their smiles.
“Hard-hitting emotional messaging” is evident in all of the UK Government’s campaigns. Take for example, ‘Act Like You Have It’ or ‘Don’t Guess, Get A Test’, where the threat is exaggerated without putting the risks in sufficient context. These ads try to scare us, manipulate us and shame us — but they never inform us. These public ‘information’ campaigns are not interested in easing our impression of COVID-19’s lethality, or sharing the facts (**see Appendix below).
In short, COVID-19 is not a death sentence, and the risks of dying are dependent on age and comorbidities. But, you would never know this from the scare-inducing campaigns.
Another bitter truth is the central role that mainstream media plays, and how it distorts people’s perception of their risk of dying from COVID-19. Only last week, Charlie Chester, a CNN technical director, revealed how the channel uses fear in order to boost ratings. In a secretly recorded video, he explained how “Fear really drives numbers” and describes receiving calls from the head of the network with directions to put the COVID-19 death toll on screen because it’s the “most enticing” content.
In fact, one wonders if the editorial integrity of mainstream news is compromised by the welcome flow of government ad money? Do news outlets comply in return for massive, taxpayer funded advertising expenditure? Not so according to Tracy De Groose of Newsworks, which led the UK news industry’s unified response with the ‘Stay At Home’ campaign in April 2020. At the launch, she assured: “Of course, our journalists will continue to scrutinise the actions of the government at every turn of this pandemic and they will continue to play their part in defeating this terrible virus.” Evidently, this has not happened as avenues of debate are regularly closed, and countless critics of the government’s strategy, like Lord Sumption, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young, are ridiculed and ostracised.
Fear is the Currency of Control
Fear is our most powerful emotion. A primal instinct honed over millennia. It overrides logic and switches us into survival mode. If people were thinking clearly, they would challenge the arbitrary, disproportionate and draconian measures. They would see the inhumanity of cancelling Christmas with grandma or the absolute absurdity of a bride and groom wearing face masks. But no, paralysed with fear, most people enthusiastically back the oppressive restrictions, the unfolding mass testing regime — and the miracle ‘vaccine’. If people looked at the solid facts about COVID-19 and employed their critical thinking, they would be less afraid and less eager to take the fast-tracked experimental injection. They would understand that this jab has less to do with health — and more to do with control. As every religious leader, politician or dictator knows: fear is the currency of control.
Just before the first lockdown, I visited the exhibition ‘Design of the Third Reich’ in Design Museum Den Bosch. It was billed as the first major retrospective of design of Nazi Germany. It was a chilling collection of paraphernalia: everything from posters, flags, ID cards, architectural drawings, and the films of Leni Riefenstahl were on show. It was unsettling. Shocking. Yet, these items were produced by ordinary German citizens. Designers, printers, architects, engineers and journalists, amongst them. Collectively these tradespeople helped to create, shape and propel the most evil regime in history.
As I departed Den Bosch, I pondered: How could ordinary people produce this extraordinary material? Were they aware of the consequences? or were they too just ‘following orders’?
Fast-forward to today and ask the same questions: Where are the conscientious voices from the highly influential fields of advertising and design? Are the film-makers, web developers, graphic designers, illustrators, photographers and copywriters aware of their complicity in an unprecedented campaign of fearmongering propaganda? What are they thinking when designing pretty posters that promote ‘Stay At Home’ measures (after 13 months), or when creating slick ad campaigns that promote the idea that asymptomatic people spread the COVID-19 virus? or funky infographics about coughing and sneezing etiquette? or seductive data visualisations that distort the data? Where is the critical and analytical thinking?
Today’s campaign of mass fear is no longer about trying to save lives — or stopping the spread of a contagious disease. It is designed to create the maximum level of fear and anxiety about COVID-19, in pursuit of maximum compliance with the restrictions and maximum desire for the ‘vaccine’. Under cover of a spurious pandemic, our freedoms, our livelihoods, our health and our humanity are being systematically destroyed. And our bodily autonomy undermined.
As marketing and advertising professionals, it’s high time to question our complicity in this campaign of fearmongering propaganda, which is not just shaping attitudes and changing behaviours, but is pushing the world toward a new form of totalitarianism — or a ‘New Normal’, if you prefer the catchier, more marketable term.
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Appendix:
Some facts about COVID-19
• Average age of COVID-19 death in the UK is just over 82, while life expectancy in the UK is 79.4 years for males and 83.1 years for females.
• COVID-19 recovery rate is 99+%, particularly for people under 65. COVID-19 poses virtually zero risk to children and the under 45’s.(Source)
• The overall Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of COVID-19 is 0.15% (with a range of 0.1% to 0.5% in the general population). This is substantially lower than the frightening figure of 3.4% announced by WHO in March 2020.
• The vast majority of ‘COVID-19 deaths’ had underlying health conditions or significant comorbidities, such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Is counting these deaths a misrepresentation of the facts and an exaggeration of the death toll?
• People who die ‘within 28 days of positive test’ in the UK are deemed to have died from COVID-19, even if they die from a heart attack or falling off a ladder. This clearly over-inflates the death toll.
• Influenza basically disappeared in 2020. Where did it go? Was it reclassified or ‘re-branded’ as COVID-19?
In the Netherlands, the data on mortality associated with influenza is easy to access: [2016/17 = 7,500], [2017/18 = 9,500] and [2019/20= 600]
To date, COVID-19 death total in the Netherlands is approx. 17,000. However, this is for TWO flu seasons (2019/20 + 2020/21). So,… just do the maths.
• A ‘positive’ PCR test does not mean that an individual is infected (nor infective) or even ill. The PCR test is not fit for purpose as a diagnostic test.
• There are several safe and very effective treatments and preventative treatments for COVID-19.
