Fear and Spin： Government Manipulation on COVID-19
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 4 minutes
Words per minute
182.66405
Harmful content
Misogyny
5
sentences flagged
Toxicity
13
sentences flagged
Hate speech
12
sentences flagged
Summary
Laura Dosworth is the author of A State of Fear: How the Government Uses Fear to Control People and Control Behaviour. In this episode, Francis and Constantine talk to Laura Dosworth about her new book, which explores how the government uses fear to control people and behaviour during a pandemic.
Transcript
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Something that just chilled my blood was when I spoke to one of the psychologists who sits on that advisory panel to ask if they'd been tasked with thinking about how to get the British population back to normal.
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And if I could paraphrase something like normal, what normal?
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You know, we're now facing climate change and we've made great gains on carbon emissions and we can't go back to normal.
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is the author of this book, A State of Fear, Laura Dosworth.
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Welcome to Trigonometry. Hi, thank you for having me.
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It's great to have you on the show. We're going to talk about the book in a second, but before we do,
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just tell everybody a little bit about who are you how are you where you are what has been the
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journey that leads you to be sitting here talking to us oh my goodness there's quite a lot in there
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let's say oh let's break it down the I suppose the reason I'm here right now is the book is
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I suppose in essence it's quite reactionary we've just been living through an absolutely
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extraordinary time in British life and politics and I didn't um I didn't have a plan to write a
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book like that. But I just had to react to what was going on around me in the world. And then
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before that, I've been a writer and a photographer for some years. I think of myself as a creative
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and a storyteller. Well, it's a story that needs to be told. This book is about how the government
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has used essentially psychology to scare people into responding to the pandemic and to the lockdown
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and to the restrictions in the way that they've wanted. And I wanted to open with a quote that
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you give from the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on behavior, which was in March of 2020,
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which is, they say, the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among
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those who are complacent using hard-hitting emotional messaging. Is that what this is all
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about in the last year, that we've had a pandemic and the government has sought to shape our
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response to it through hard-hitting emotional messaging. Is that why we're seeing polling
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results now that boggle the mind in terms of the number of people who support curfews,
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permanent restrictions, permanent wearing of masks? I mean, you can go down the list
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in terms of the stuff that people believe. People, when polled, believe that I think like 10% of the
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public have died from COVID if asked on the street. So is that how we're here?
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Yes, I'd say so. So first of all, to kind of add an annoying caveat that I feel like I have to say
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at the beginning, which is this book doesn't refute that COVID is a serious disease and
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people have died and that we've been in a pandemic, not at all. But as one of the psychologists I
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interviewed said to me, in the absence of a vaccine, the tool you have is psychology. That's
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their opinion. They're a psychologist, they would say that. They also said to me that psychology
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has had a very good epidemic. So the government decided to go the route of imposing lockdowns
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and very strict regulations to control behaviour, to limit transmission and to protect the NHS.
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I know that goalposts have moved lots of times, but if you remember the original goalpost,
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it was flatten the curve to protect the NHS. And that minute from an extraordinary document
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which was produced by SPI-B that's the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour which
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reports into SAGE and into the government is answering a question and the question is how do
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we make people comply with lockdown rules? So there's a whole host of options in the document
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and one of them sets out very clearly in black and white that the British public should be frightened
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into complying. So that is exhibit A in the thesis that the government has used fear to control
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behaviour during the epidemic. And I think we can still see it happening now in lots of ways. We
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could, you know, we could talk about things that are going on now, like nudges maybe to increase
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vaccination uptake by constantly dangling the threat of COVID passes. And as a result, for some
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people, perhaps their fear and anxiety is out of scale with the severity of the threats that we're
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currently experiencing. And that could be why people are very supportive still of restrictive
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measures and overestimate the threat of the disease when they're asked in polls.
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But Laura, hang on a second. So let's go back to that first lockdown. We didn't know what was
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happening. We didn't know how virulent the virus was. We didn't know a lot about it. Wasn't the
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first lockdown and quite a tough advertising campaign the way to deal with this virus?
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There are quite a few things to separate out there. First of all, you could accept the
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premise that a lockdown was a sensible precaution. It doesn't necessarily mean that it needed
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advertising that would exaggerate the threat of the disease. It was understood right from
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the beginning that COVID is very age stratified and it's also a risk to people with particular
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identifiable clinical conditions. So telling everybody they were equally at risk wouldn't
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necessarily be the only way to enforce a lockdown. I can see how some people think it would. And I
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think when all this is done and dusted, it will be really important to have a debate about what
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sort of messaging is appropriate. But I can see how some people would say in the teeth of the
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crisis, any means justified the end. The ends justify the means. Wrong way. Wrong way round.
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You know what I mean. But the book also isn't about whether lockdowns are a good idea. But I
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I have to say it became difficult in the course of writing a book to completely extricate lockdowns and fear messaging.
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And to that end, there's an appendix and it's called Lockdowns Don't Work.
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But actually, lockdowns were never used before March 2020.
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In fact, they were contraindicated because they're not based on strong evidence.
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They're based on simulations, which the World Health Organization's warned against before.
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They're known to be very harmful and they're not known to necessarily impact transmission.
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I think you'll find here that anybody that's supported lockdowns, including the people who enacted the policies,
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are going to try and tell us that lockdowns are effective.
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But there are lots of empirical studies and other countries around the world that I think shake that idea.
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So you said that lockdowns are very harmful. Let's just touch on that before moving on onwards.
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Because there's a lot of people in this country, I think the majority of the population, are in favour of lockdowns.
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how are lockdowns harmful? There's so much collateral damage already from lockdowns,
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and I think it's still too early for people to perceive all of the impacts. And I think it's
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fair to say that the jury is still out. I never really thought it made sense from day one.
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And I know that puts me in a real outlier position, because I think telling people they can't go out
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to work when they're completely healthy and not necessarily infectious is just an extraordinary
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thing to do to a family. I mean, that was me. My work just stopped. And I was shocked I wouldn't
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be able to go out and earn a living. And there would have been lots of people in that position,
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you know, they were told to put their relationships on hold. So it damages relationships.
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Not everybody could work from home or got the eventual furlough, so it stopped income.
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I think probably most worryingly of all, we see in the NHS waiting list now how many people were
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probably too frightened to go to hospital. I interviewed a disaster and recovery planner
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who's one of the foremost experts in this country and in the world and she says you just don't lock
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down for a coronavirus. She said in any pandemic you bluntly you power through and she's involved
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in planning mortuary capacity and death planning and she said that for every one COVID death they
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were planning another four deaths as a result of lockdown and associated risks over the coming
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years. So this isn't just my idea. Let's move on from lockdown, because your book really isn't
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about that. It's really not about lockdown. So let's move on from that. I wouldn't want anyone
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watching this to watch this from a pro-anti-lockdown perspective. I think the important
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conversation is about the methodology that's been used to publicise and promote whatever has been
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happening. That's a much more important conversation. The locked and pro-anti-lockdown
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argument has been had, including on our show, many times. True, but you see you brought it up
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Because it is actually quite difficult to extricate them because people will say, well, anything's justified if it kept people in their homes, if it made them follow the lockdown rules.
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And that's why you can't completely separate them.
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Right. So let's just for the sake of argument say that lockdowns do work.
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And in fact, they're extremely effective at stopping a pandemic.
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and those of us like you and me who are deeply concerned about the impact of lockdowns
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on health, on cancer, on heart disease, etc., etc., on mental well-being, on suicides, etc.
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One of the arguments, for example, is that all of that would have happened anyway
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because if we didn't lock down, the NHS would have collapsed and you'd still have a massive backlog.
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Let's say, for the sake of argument, all of that is true.
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Is it not then ethical for the government to use fear in the way that they have
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to get people to comply with the rules that they believe are necessary to protect the public?
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In the course of researching the book, I've come to a very sceptical position on that.
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And I think that actually, that in the inevitable inquiry,
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it's going to be really important to tackle the fear messaging specifically.
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You know, you've got to remember that the Advertising Standards Authority codifies against this for a reason.
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There were specific campaigns which misled on the risk.
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There was a government campaign that had to be withdrawn, was found against by the Advertising Standards Authority.
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And there are others that just exaggerated the risks for the wrong group's people.
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There's one I remember that was a group of teenage boys sitting in a park and it said COVID kills.
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Well, COVID hasn't really killed teenage boys, especially outdoors in a park.
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So was that the way to make them stay indoors and observe lockdown rules?
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Well, if you think that people won't behave unless they're frightened, maybe you'd think that.
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But what about a more honest campaign about who's at risk and what we all need to do to protect those people?
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The argument would be, it's not an argument that I particularly support,
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But I want to put the fully fledged counterpoint here because I think that's the point of having the conversation would be, well, teenage boys are not being killed by COVID, but they're picking if they were to catch it by socializing outdoors when COVID is rampant in March and April of 2020, they go home, spread it to their parents.
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Their parents go and visit granny or whatever because they deliver some shopping.
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So what is the argument against scaring teenagers into not going out when arguably those teenagers are potentially spreading COVID to people who are vulnerable?
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I think that at the beginning, probably government politicians and advisors acted maybe in a panic and they didn't think about the end result.
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what's the end result of a pandemic we want everyone to be healthy you know as many people
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survive as possible and society to go back to normal if you want to get to that end point you
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don't terrify people we went into this without an exit strategy so one of the problems with the
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tactic of frightening people who are not in a risk category is that everybody's fear is amplified to
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a degree that we can't get it back down. So a psychologist has identified a syndrome now
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called COVID anxiety syndrome, whereby 20% of people are engaging in overly obsessive hygiene
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or they don't want to go outside. We know from ONS figures that half of the people who were
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clinically shielding are still shielding, even though they don't need to be because they're
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vaccinated. We know from polls, there were some really extraordinary figures I read last week,
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that I think 71% of people, according to YouGov,
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want people to carry and wear masks on public transport.
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is that it's hard for people to get back to normal fear makes recovery harder there's also
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been an impact on some people's mental health you know people have developed OCDs agoraphobia
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people develop depression there have been various ONS studies showing that people developed
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depression in lockdown and it's difficult to extricate how much will have come from fearful
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messaging how much will come from lockdown how much will have come from a natural fear of the
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epidemic, but there's a lot going on. Another problem with that type of advertising, and
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advertising is only one tool to frighten people, but it's a big one, and it was costly as well.
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It's a lot of money. A lot of our taxpayers' money has been spent on this. Another problem is it
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deflects criticism. So it doesn't just frighten people, it puts people into groups. Are you good?
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Are you a COVID hero? Or are you a COVID idiot and a granny killer? And it encourages ill will
1.00
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and blame and finger pointing between people do you remember the ad campaign look him in the eyes
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and tell him you never bend the rules so presumably matt hancock is somebody who would have signed off
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on that so first of all let's just get that in it's a bit hypocritical doing a lot of bending
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well you might have seen something i haven't seen i've just seen a little a little bit of footage
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in the sun my eyes um but it also creates finger pointing among people so instead of going well
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hang on, should we point the finger at policies, at politicians, at the big issues about nosocomial
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infection? People move from hospitals to care homes. The PPE scandal, we're pointing the finger
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at rule breakers. So instead of the kind of solidarity that you want in people in an epidemic,
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we're divided into the good guys and the bad guys. And of course, what that does creates kind of like
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herd mentality and othering and dehumanising of other people. Also, you're talking about the
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young people. Is that really fair to put that responsibility onto them? A granny killer is
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one of the most unedifying things I've ever heard. One of my sons was shouted at in a corridor at
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school when he wasn't wearing his mask correctly. And the teacher shouted, you're killing people.
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Well, you know, if he was literally killing people, that would be a police matter, wasn't it?
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But his mask was a half-mast in a school corridor.
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So what's the impact on teenagers and children of being told
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they can literally kill their grandparents and the elderly?
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And let's not forget, at the beginning of the epidemic,
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it was acknowledged that a lot of people that would die
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were people who would die at some point in the coming year or so anyway
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I think it was Professor Neil Ferguson who said that
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So to put that blame onto young people, I just think is really disproportionate and unfair.
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In Germany, what's now known as the panic papers, which are reported on in Welt am Sontag, involved leaked emails between politicians and scientists asking them to basically exaggerate the risks of the disease and use fear messaging in order to encourage compliance with the rules.
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quite similar but they went into more lurid detail than the the spy bee minute that you
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quote from my book and one example that they give is that children shouldn't be allowed to think it's
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safe to go out and play outside and you should plan the guilt that they'll feel if they go and
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play outside and then they infect people in their household and and their family dies I just think
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that's a cruel thing to do to a child and there's different ways of doing it there's different ways
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a communicating risk does it have to be frightening hey francis think about all the times you've used
00:16:55.220
wi-fi at a coffee shop a hotel or even at your parents house happy memories well without express
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vpn every site you visit could be locked by the admin of that network and that's still true even
00:17:07.920
when you're in incognito mode even when you're in incognito mode still happy memories what what's
00:17:13.400
your home internet provider i'm talking comcast at&t whatever can also see and record your
0.97
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browsing data and they are legally allowed to sell it on to others i'm so screwed you are
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Do you not worry that the government has used this tool
00:18:56.380
They can take this out at whatever point they want again
00:18:59.860
or do you think it's a one-off thing? Nervous giggle. I would love to think it's a one-off
00:19:07.600
thing but I don't really see why it would be. I've got no reason to believe that. It is of
00:19:13.480
course incredibly effective. I just wrote a feature for the Telegraph about the nudges we'll see
00:19:18.260
during the rest of the epidemic and I checked in with one of my anonymous sources who advises in
00:19:23.960
government who told me that there is skipping in Whitehall and they're skipping through the
00:19:28.800
corridors. They've had a very good epidemic. And one of the big learnings is that the British
1.00
00:19:32.860
people have been sheepish and there's lots more nudge coming. It's worked. Why would they not do
00:19:37.340
it again? If you've read the book, guys, if you've read the book, you might remember how the chapter
00:19:43.400
on Spy B starts. And something that just chilled my blood was when I spoke to one of the psychologists
00:19:51.080
who sits on that advisory panel to ask if they'd been tasked with thinking about how to get the
00:19:58.300
British population back to normal? And he seemed shocked that I asked. And if I could paraphrase
00:20:04.200
it's something like normal, what normal? You know, we're now facing climate change and we've made
00:20:10.780
great gains on carbon emissions and we can't go back to normal. And I think you can already see
00:20:16.460
a segue into using some of the same tools to perhaps encourage behaviour change that will
00:20:23.740
be needed to meet net zero targets. I've seen a very scary ad produced by Net Zero Scotland
00:20:28.000
already well the something francis and i talked about we did an episode where him and i were
00:20:33.960
talking about this and uh the the fact that this is now part of the toolbox uh that can be produced
00:20:41.260
for other perceived threats is something that people should be very worried about i think
00:20:46.420
but um in terms of the the methodology tell everybody you use you reference nudge which
00:20:54.080
most of us understand, but some people may be less familiar with. What is nudge theory and how has it
00:20:59.880
been used in particular for this pandemic, but also previously, because I think it was Cameron
00:21:03.560
who really first started talking about it. Maybe it was even used before. Tell everybody a little
00:21:08.540
bit about that. Yeah, sure. So the nudge unit is the colloquial term for the behavioural insights
00:21:13.620
team, which was set up under the David Cameron government. And that's now legally and operationally
00:21:20.120
separate to the government, it's a limited company. Britain's terribly good at behavioural
00:21:24.280
psychology, we actually, or behavioural science, we export it all around the world. They have
00:21:28.480
offices in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and others. So a nudge is implicit, which means you
00:21:37.800
won't really be aware of it. It affects your choices without being a mandate. A nudge is just
00:21:42.200
one tool in the behavioural science toolbox. So there's the behavioural insights team, and they've
00:21:48.000
been doing some things that look kind of innocuous in terms of making people pay their tax returns
00:21:52.000
on time or um plastic bags i don't know if they work on that but that that might be the that's
00:21:58.220
the kind of five people plastic bags yeah yeah exactly it's choice architecture it's giving you
00:22:03.060
a choice and trying to nudge you into the the right one the one that makes you a model citizen
00:22:07.120
the one that somewhere some clever people in a clever room have decided that you not so clever
00:22:11.440
people should be doing um there isn't just the paper insights team there's spy b which we've
00:22:17.560
already referred to. Now that's a voluntary group of advisors and they don't just work on the COVID
00:22:23.980
epidemic, they also advise the government on other risks and other things on the National Risk
00:22:27.660
Register. But what I found fascinating but a bit disturbing in the course of researching the book
00:22:33.740
was how many brick walls I hit when I was trying to find out more about behavioural science and
00:22:40.100
government. But what became clear to me is how much the government does rely on behavioural
00:22:43.940
science. There are behavioural scientists in, I think, probably every government department,
00:22:48.420
also within the NHS, also within Public Health England. There are also units which are set up
00:22:55.620
to manage the flow of information, manage counter disinformation. You might call some
00:23:01.220
of it propaganda. You might call some of it behavioural psychology. What they do is a
00:23:05.240
little bit opaque. There's the counter disinformation unit and there's the research
00:23:08.580
Information Communication Unit, there's GCHQ, there's the 77th Brigade, which is part of the
00:23:14.900
army. And haven't you been surprised at how easily manipulated it seems the British public have been?
00:23:22.960
I certainly have. I found it shocking. I don't know. I've gone through all kinds of different
00:23:28.160
emotions about it. The thing is, epidemics are really frightening. I might not have thought
00:23:35.200
lockdown was a good idea but I was also frightened about the epidemic at the beginning I remember
00:23:39.640
stocking up on tinned food in case I got in and my kids would have to cook on their own you know
00:23:44.660
it's normal it's hard baked into us to be frightened I think fear was an open door
00:23:51.760
and that's that's the point it was really easy for the government to leverage it because fear
00:23:55.480
was already there and behavioural science works I mean it's advertising it's the bakery in the
00:24:02.620
supermarket. It's all around us all the time. I don't know if the British people have been
00:24:08.540
especially sheepish. That's what the advisor's view was. I quoted them in this Telegraph feature.
00:24:15.020
I don't know because I haven't done enough comparison of attitudes in different countries
00:24:20.660
to be sure. It might just be that it was wielded a lot more heavily on us. But surely when you have
00:24:27.620
access to facts because we all have the internet, doesn't that mean that you're able to challenge
00:24:33.540
the government's propaganda far more effectively and think for yourself?
00:24:38.600
Well, it depends what you rely on for your news sources. That's the thing. I was looking up
00:24:45.060
infection fatality rates at the beginning, but a lot of people, if they're relying on the Downing
00:24:50.080
street press briefings or just mainstream news stories which are more what's the word
00:24:59.220
fear-mongering at the beginning um not everybody goes off and researches alternate sources of
00:25:04.640
information to to get that balance not all media's been equal in this time i think it's been a bit of
00:25:10.280
a mixed bag one one of the experiences has really struck me particularly over the last few months
00:25:15.660
As COVID has become far less dangerous, we've got the vaccine program, which has been a huge success.
00:25:28.420
And every time there's a conversation, whether it's on television or in the papers or whatever,
00:25:34.560
when I am saying, well, look, we've got more hospitals in England than people with COVID in hospital.
00:25:42.020
This is, at the time the government delayed the Freedom Day last time, that was the case.
00:25:47.520
I'm saying, look, the average number of deaths from COVID, with COVID, not from COVID, is like in low 20s, let's say.
00:25:54.640
So very few people are dying from COVID out of a daily death toll of about 1,400.
00:25:59.120
Or, you know, you are not a threat if you are under the age of 18.
00:26:03.700
These obvious facts that everybody, including the scientists, will accept.
00:26:08.380
And yet the response from the public to that information,
00:26:12.460
if it's reaching them at all, is just so disproportionate.
00:26:21.660
because I feel like in the book you've got the explanation
00:26:25.340
of that disconnect between the facts on the one hand
00:26:30.960
Do you think that the rational way that some people are reacting
00:26:49.940
at understanding risk and numbers, and I get that.
00:26:57.760
I remember one which showed somebody on a gurney,
00:27:00.440
but their head was just kind of conveniently out of frame.
00:27:05.820
gives you the impression that they don't have a head.
00:27:07.360
of course you know they have a head but it looks a bit scary and health workers with big masks on
00:27:13.660
and it looked like something out of a horror film and you know the language is very dramatic.
00:27:20.180
You see that, that's what gets you. Not later on doing a bit of research into infection fatality
00:27:25.560
rates. I talked to a broadsheet journalist anonymously for the chapter in the media
00:27:30.780
and you know they were explaining that sometimes it's just a race to get the news out, you know,
00:27:36.620
So if you remember the witty and valance shock and awe
00:27:41.260
presentation, I call it the shock and awe presentation,
00:27:49.000
Then afterwards, they kind of had their knuckles
00:27:50.380
wrapped a little bit by Theresa May and the National Statistics
00:27:56.980
Obviously, newspapers reported on that straight away
00:28:02.600
that go into more granular detail and say, well, it's not really going to be as bad as all that.
00:28:08.120
But what hits people the most? It's the first story. It's the steep red line. It's the big,
00:28:12.220
scary number. And what would you say to people who go, look, we've always had a history of doing
00:28:17.300
this in a pandemic. Look at the AIDS campaign in the mid 80s. Don't die of ignorance with the
00:28:22.020
tombstone literally falling and then making that huge sound. What would you say to those people?
00:28:31.720
So essentially, you know, we've always done this in pandemics.
00:28:35.260
Look at the HIV AIDS pandemic, the very famous advertisement with the gravestone falling,
00:28:39.920
and then John Hurt's narration with the words, don't die of ignorance.
00:28:45.460
Well, that is a good comparison because it was frightening.
00:28:49.680
There are quite a few differences and quite a few similarities.
00:28:52.420
um somebody interviewed for the book um professor knut batowski um talked about that from when he
00:28:59.540
was in germany and he said he really struggled at the time because he knew this wasn't a virus
00:29:04.500
that was going to affect children but for instance messaging at the time was children shouldn't touch
00:29:08.280
each other's toys they'll catch aids you know the risks were perhaps not very well understood right
00:29:13.900
at the beginning and then exaggerated and some of the early aids campaigning told gay men not to
0.93
00:29:20.400
have sex well that just goes completely against human nature don't be silly and then it moves to
0.95
00:29:24.940
safe sex and people go back and look at that campaign and assume it was really successful
0.66
00:29:30.620
but I think that it might be a bit modelled up with people wanting to say it was successful and
00:29:36.800
ignoring the impacts of grassroots work at the time you know needle exchanges and other things
00:29:43.180
you might be younger than me but I remember that campaign and I didn't really know what it was
00:29:48.840
about except that it was to do something very very scary called sex and it was it just really
00:29:54.840
it had an impact on me but I didn't really know why I was scared not sure that I needed that um
00:30:01.900
I don't don't feel it's particularly emotionally scarred or anything it's fine I guess the core
00:30:06.960
of France's question and this is something I wanted to ask you about anyway is is it not
00:30:11.920
appropriate for the government sometimes to exaggerate the threat in order to get people
00:30:16.980
to pay attention to something and to follow rules.
00:30:21.920
the government wouldn't be releasing the day-to-day information
00:30:25.900
about what's happening because there's a reason for that.
00:30:29.320
Now, in war, it's obviously so the enemy doesn't find out what's going on,
00:30:32.960
but there are situations in which it's okay for the government
00:30:36.940
not to be telling the full truth about what's going on.
00:30:45.880
I think it's a debate. I'm not going to appoint myself benign dictator of the world and think
00:30:52.420
that I know best. I think it really needs to be scrutinised with expert witnesses in a
00:30:59.960
consultation. I don't like the lack of honesty and I don't like the lack of transparency.
00:31:05.120
I mean, you're right, in a war, some information would be withheld. But in fact, we had the
00:31:09.820
opposite. We were flooded with gloomy numbers and we were the fallen. You know, we've been
00:31:14.900
subjected to frightening metrics all the way through, but there's been a slight lack of honesty
00:31:19.580
sometimes about what they mean and a lack of context, which has created a disproportionate
00:31:26.060
level of fear, which has brought its own host of collateral damages, like an increase in alcohol
00:31:31.580
abuse, an increase in opiate addictions, an increase in mental health problems, people being
00:31:36.400
too scared to go to the hospital and then dying at home, people going too late for heart conditions
00:31:48.920
I mean, we were told about deaths, but never recoveries.
00:31:56.000
The hospital admissions number has always been quite
00:31:58.560
one of the prominent numbers on the government COVID dashboard,
00:32:01.300
but it doesn't tell you what you think it does.
00:32:03.940
You might think it means how many people were admitted
00:32:09.060
It also includes people who went to hospital routinely
00:32:11.480
for something else, and then they were diagnosed with COVID. And it also includes people who caught
00:32:16.120
COVID in hospital. That's more than you think. So that's an important number. And when you're
00:32:20.520
planning how far apart beds need to be spaced and staffing, it's a really important number,
00:32:24.800
but it's not the number people thought it was. So I think there's a whole chapter on the metrics
00:32:30.380
of fear in the book. There's lots of ways in which numbers were presented in ways that inflated
00:32:35.300
alarm and amplified fear. And it's so interesting you say that because what these numbers did is
00:32:42.360
it unleashed a petty authoritarianism across the country, not only from newspapers, but also people
00:32:49.440
being encouraged to snitch on their neighbours. It felt like we were living out of something from
00:32:54.800
the Soviet Union. Yeah, don't talk badly about my people. Well, it has had a bit of a whiff of
00:33:00.760
community block policing about it. I remember the first time I heard about a snitch line,
00:33:04.540
I was really depressed. I thought, no, don't do this. It was just awful. And even as we've been
00:33:12.780
coming into recovery, some of the messaging has been really just depressing. One minister said,
00:33:18.500
yeah, tell people that you'll report them if you see them hugging. It's just tell on Matt Hancock.
00:33:26.500
It's just really depressing. And that's what I meant before about dividing people. It's not just
00:33:31.880
about creating fear. It's also about creating groups and dehumanising and snitching on the
00:33:38.500
naughty ones. I mean, there've been some very unedifying moments. Do you remember two teenagers,
00:33:43.460
two students, where they might not be teenagers, but students who are fined £10,000 each for
00:33:48.600
organising a snowball fight in January? Good. Really? No, I'm joking. I'm miserable. I've got
00:33:55.560
back pain. But no, but you're serious. Even though we knew the science at the time, that was
00:34:01.340
highly unlikely for people to catch COVID outside. Even though we knew that. And these fines are
00:34:08.940
literally the worst fines since the time of the Sheriff of Nottingham. I mean, really,
00:34:13.320
they're the worst fines. You have to go back to the dark ages. And that's what we've done to,
00:34:18.620
because that makes you then terrified to break the rules. And some people might say, good,
00:34:22.480
you know, don't do the time, don't do the crime. But it's a pretty steep fine for students.
00:34:28.220
Well, and to add to that the fact that I don't think there's been a single prosecution under the rules that were brought in that actually got upheld in court.
00:34:39.520
So people are scared not to break rules, but when those rules are actually tested, those rules are unenforceable by their very nature in some instances.
00:34:51.640
Because you said before we started I was allowed to jump in, so I've got something I want to jump in on.
00:34:57.560
Because I think you asking me, well, is it OK to use fear is good.
00:35:07.080
I'm quite opinionated, but it needs public consultation.
00:35:12.020
But I just want to say that some of the most damning indictments
00:35:14.420
come from psychologists that I interviewed and government advisors.
00:35:18.620
And that's part of the spine of the book, to be honest.
00:35:22.660
You know, I spoke to one longstanding government advisor
00:35:25.140
who told me that they're stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology.
00:35:29.640
And I spoke to a psychologist who is on Spy Bee,
00:35:33.400
who said that they wake up at 3am with the fear of what they've done
00:35:40.740
So this isn't just some mad rambling thesis of mine.
00:35:45.080
I've interviewed a multitude of professionals and academics
00:35:48.820
who not only share these concerns, they voice them more clearly than me.
00:35:53.200
and you say dystopia i mean that's a pretty strong word to use what do you mean by the
00:35:57.580
is it look around my friend well look i mean the people would say oh come on but we're not living
00:36:03.480
you know you're not getting carted off we don't have gulags we don't have concentration camps
00:36:08.380
that's a true meaning of a dystopia you set a high standard there great as long as we're not
00:36:13.280
there we're fine okay yeah i'll be the first in the re-education gulag probably embroidering face
00:36:19.200
masks or something, I don't know. It's not me who called it a dystopia, but I think there's
00:36:24.220
aspects of this year that have felt dystopian. I think there's been a lot of fear in the air,
00:36:29.640
and you caught it one way or the other, and whatever dystopia means to you, it's probably
00:36:34.760
felt dystopian one way or another to a lot of people. It has felt dystopian. To me, the moment
00:36:40.740
where I started to lose faith in the government was the issue of masks, where at the start they
00:36:47.320
said, oh, no, you shouldn't wear masks. There's no evidence. You know, the evidence is weak
00:36:51.420
surrounding masks. And isn't the evidence weak surrounding masks anyway? But it seems that we've
00:36:57.040
now been turned against each other. Yeah, this is a kind of a classic example of where the thesis
00:37:04.920
of my book takes you. But it's still so controversial to talk about because people are largely in
00:37:10.600
favour. And they're largely in favour because they've been told by their government that their
00:37:14.960
mask protects other people. The government's own website, not the kind of like the basic
00:37:20.600
advice bit, go into their policy papers, says that the evidence is weak and it's limited.
00:37:27.120
There isn't good hard evidence in favour of masks. Flyweight would be fair. There's one
00:37:32.720
randomised controlled trial into mask use, the Dan Mask study. I interviewed one of the authors
00:37:37.680
for the book. And to be fair, that study was about whether your mask protects you. That's
00:37:44.180
what they chose to investigate at the time. And they say it may be that the study's statistically
00:37:48.720
underpowered, but they can't find a statistical significant improvement from wearing a mask.
00:37:55.340
So that's the best study that we've got now about wearing masks in the community.
00:37:59.780
It's very mixed. And I spoke to an MP who told me anonymously that masks were
00:38:04.440
brought in, he hasn't good authority, they were brought in because the economic bounce back wasn't
00:38:10.580
good enough after the first lockdown and then the behavioural scientists realise that they are a good
00:38:17.140
signal because when you see people in masks you're reminded that there's an epidemic it's dangerous
00:38:22.020
out there we become walking billboards for danger and epidemic a virus and fear so it might encourage
00:38:28.120
people to follow the rules they also represent solidarity apparently according to some of the
00:38:33.820
spy bee advisors they love words like solidarity and collectivism they love the idea that we're
00:38:37.760
all in it together in our masks. Sounds very familiar from my car. Yeah, so the evidence
00:38:45.400
isn't good, but people now firmly believe it is because that's what they've been told. And I just
00:38:50.080
think it's a really shocking thing to have done to a population. It is. And I've seen it happen
00:38:56.520
because you talk about masks. I was just talking to a friend of a friend who I remember at the
00:39:05.940
And she was saying, we don't need to wear masks.
00:39:08.400
I wear a mask when I'm doing surgery on an animal
00:39:10.900
to prevent my saliva from going into the wound.
00:39:21.020
Fast forward eight months later, this person is saying
00:39:23.260
they will never stop wearing a mask for the rest of their life.
00:39:28.260
And that has happened to someone who's a medical professional
00:39:43.100
I think if we're not careful, they're going to stay around.
00:39:48.160
I can't remember which one, maybe because I couldn't see her face,
00:39:50.660
but she was wearing this dress that has this cowl neck
0.98
00:39:58.040
And I saw that, I was like, oh no, please God, no,
00:40:00.480
don't incorporate it into dresses I'm not buying one of those but also do you know do we really
00:40:05.820
think that virus labs around the world are going to adopt that as their as their PPE no but Laura
00:40:12.900
the question I wanted to ask you is is about what's happening now because we're now at a point
00:40:19.060
where we're approaching the lifting of restrictions here in the UK the despite the fact that basically
00:40:25.260
most of the public don't seem to want it to happen. And we seem to be in a position now where
00:40:30.880
the government you alluded to earlier, they believe that they are entitled to threaten people
00:40:37.000
with taking away their rights, which up until this point in human civilization have always been
00:40:43.840
considered absolute and unrestrictable by government, which is your right to meet people,
00:40:49.940
your right of association, your right to be outdoors, etc. They are now saying that if you're
00:40:54.820
not vaccinated you will not be able to enjoy those rights like going into a pub or whatever
00:41:00.680
even though I don't think they believe that the restrictions themselves are necessary so in other
00:41:05.640
words they're scaring people with taking away rights that don't need to be taken away just to
00:41:11.200
force young people in this instance to take the vaccine. I mean why is no one saying that that's
00:41:17.140
unethical other than like three of us? Well I think there are more than that it's quite a difficult
00:41:22.720
conversation to have and I think that some of the media are running scared because it's difficult
00:41:27.060
to talk about it without sounding critical of the vaccine program or critical of the vaccine and
00:41:32.600
god forbid you'd want to be on the anti-vax team and I'm going to do another caveat here
00:41:37.080
I'm not an anti-vaxxer I've had childhood vaccinations travel vaccinations blah blah blah
00:41:42.140
but Laura just to interrupt you there isn't that the problem can you not be critical of this
00:41:47.000
vaccine and say look I'm worried about it a lot of it uses new technology I'm not sure if I want
00:41:52.000
to be exposed to this new technology automatically boom anti-vaxxer those are two completely
00:41:57.660
different positions surely well they should be they should be but they've but they're not at
00:42:02.580
the moment and the term refusenik was used it kind of floated up all at once and then it went away
00:42:07.700
because people said it wasn't appropriate refusenik is actually a positive term if someone refuses to
00:42:11.980
comply with government diktat but anyway let's not get but it wasn't used like that here was it
00:42:16.660
So there's a lot of nudging going on. And I agree with you. I think that the threat of the COVID
00:42:23.360
pass is to encourage young people to have the vaccine. Now, do we believe that Parliament can
00:42:28.420
do a good job when allowed to follow parliamentary process? I believe it. I love this country. I love
00:42:33.260
democracy. I love politics. There was a select committee into the use of COVID passes and it
00:42:40.520
found against them. So there's no scientific justification. So that's the result of a select
00:42:45.540
committee into the COVID pass. And yet they're being threatened. And I think it is to encourage
00:42:53.520
the young to get vaccinated. But informed consent shouldn't work that way. It shouldn't be based on
00:42:59.160
a threat or creating a two-tier checkpoint society. Your choice to have any medical
00:43:04.720
intervention, including a vaccine, should be simple benefit, harm, calculus. And if you're
00:43:11.140
not sure it's right for you, the best thing for you to do is to talk to your doctor. I think if
00:43:15.880
you're not sure, then threatening somebody that they won't be able to go to a football stadium
00:43:19.780
or a bar isn't the right way to reassure them. It's a threat. The other thing that's happening
00:43:24.960
at the moment is incentives. And this is completely new to this country. So the Mayor of London's
00:43:29.300
office was giving away tickets to watch the final in Trafalgar Square and also one pair of tickets
00:43:34.580
to watch it live. And Charlton Athletic gave away a thousand tickets to the first thousand to be
00:43:40.500
vaccinated in the stadium. And I wanted to write about this in this piece I just wrote about
00:43:45.080
nudges. And neither Charlton nor the mayor's office would come back to me on the issue
00:43:49.880
of whether an incentive affects informed consent. But of course it does.
00:43:56.480
That's the point. And I spoke to a public health specialist who's a very keen vaccine advocate
00:44:00.580
who said she's very concerned about the impact on informed consent. We've never done this before.
00:44:06.360
I think we have to be really, really careful that in racing, racing to get to the finish line, the happy ending of this horrible story of a pandemic, we don't cross Rubicons.
0.96
00:44:16.660
And I think we are crossing Rubicons at the moment.
00:44:20.220
Now, if you're somebody who's resistant to the idea of a vaccine, I really don't see how the incentive or the threat will really make you have it.
00:44:27.300
What you need is to look at the risk and the harm for your personal circumstances and talk to a doctor.
00:44:36.360
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00:45:40.920
And Laura, doesn't it also show a complete contempt for ordinary working people?
00:45:44.900
Because we saw in America as well, they were giving out lotto tickets.
00:45:53.040
That's when I thought, right, I'm jumping on a plane to America.
00:45:55.600
But in all seriousness, doesn't that show a complete contempt
00:45:58.440
of ordinary people that they can be so easily manipulated
00:46:01.560
bar from tickets to watch Charlton Athletic,
1.00
00:46:05.780
And yes, there are probably three Charlton fans watching this,
1.00
00:46:10.940
The diplomatic arm with which Laura started her answer.
00:46:15.940
because, you know, my football watching is just like England in the Euros.
00:46:26.300
Well, I mean, the incentives in the US are much worse than that.
00:46:29.680
I mean, they're really the Wild West of incentives.
00:46:32.960
So I wrote about this for Spectator World, their US edition.
00:46:38.060
I mean, seriously, take a vaccine and have drugs that here would be illegal.
00:46:49.460
I thought it was the burgers that was going to do it.
00:46:51.220
Krispy Kreme doughnuts every day if you get vaccinated.
00:46:54.380
And I find that one actually really incongruous
00:46:57.700
because one of the really key comorbidities with COVID
00:47:07.440
you're not going to eat your way into optimum health that way, are you?
00:47:13.920
if 70% of the US population got vaccinated by 4th of July,
00:47:21.420
But they've been doing some really significant cash lotteries as well,
00:47:25.720
free flights and raffles, and I think most, you know,
00:47:28.240
worst of all, college education raffles as well,
00:47:32.260
So if you're 18 or 17 when they apply for college,
00:47:36.260
the risk calculus for the benefit of the vaccine is looking...
00:47:42.400
I'm not going to comment, God, science, people will get really angry with me.
00:47:53.520
If you're in your 80s and you've got comorbidities,
00:47:58.060
to if you're in your 20s and you've got no comorbidities.
00:48:09.240
So we don't want to be like the United States, do we?
00:48:13.560
Also, they actually don't have very high uptake
00:48:19.260
And the British are, you know, we have a very high uptake.
00:48:22.400
We don't have COVID passes because most people just duly go and get vaccinated.
00:48:26.740
I mean, this array of incentives may end up, and threats may end up backfiring.
00:48:31.780
It may make people feel more resistant because people don't really like being told what to do.
00:48:35.940
A vaccine really interferes with your idea of personhood and state.
00:48:42.920
Do you not, and we've been skirting around this issue as we've talked over numerous topics.
00:48:48.360
Is what we're seeing a glorified form of divide and conquer?
00:48:52.440
I think there's been lots of divide and conquer.
00:48:57.480
being told to report on your neighbours for having a party
00:48:59.900
or going out more than once a day in the lockdown.
00:49:05.920
Just at a time when people should be pulling together
00:49:13.360
the vulnerable being told not to mix with the unvaccinated which I found quite depressing it's
00:49:20.980
very othering so somebody might be unvaccinated but they might have COVID and have immunity from
00:49:26.600
that and somebody can be vaccinated and still transmit COVID it's not it's not completely
00:49:31.460
clear-cut and binary so I feel like that's another it's another tactic it's another nudge
0.99
00:49:37.040
to say the vaccinated are clean and safe and the unvaccinated are the unclean and the unsafe and I
1.00
00:49:43.700
think we have to be really careful about language that dehumanises a whole group of people who might
00:49:49.460
be unable or choosing not to have a vaccine now I won't say why but I can't have the vaccine I'm
00:49:55.120
medically exempt I'm one of those people that others are being told not to mix with or that I
00:49:59.400
might not be able to go into bars and restaurants and it's it's amazing you know that you say that
00:50:05.240
because the whole point of our governmental system
00:50:14.480
If anything, this law are more for authoritarian.
00:50:21.460
Yeah, the oppositional comes from within the framework.
00:50:26.080
It's do more of it, do it harder, do it longer,
00:50:36.720
Your position's coming from within the Conservative Party.
00:50:45.160
I'm disappointed with how Labour have handled this.
00:50:59.360
which our producer and I were sitting here the other day
00:51:03.880
like at the beginning of the pandemic, when people started banging on about various conspiracy
00:51:08.600
theories, I was like, zero chance, not even entertaining this. And as it's progressed,
00:51:13.780
it's gone from like 0% to 0.1% to like 1% now. Are you growing exponentially? Is your
00:51:20.540
conspiracy theory growing exponentially? Yeah, I think I've got an internal pandemic of the mind
00:51:24.220
going on. But why is all of this happening? I really don't know. I really don't know. I remain
00:51:32.460
very open-minded and that's something about me I'm a really really open-minded person and my book is
00:51:38.020
not why it's how because I don't think we know the why at the moment it could just be that and I'm
00:51:44.860
going to go back to what the book is about about how the UK government weaponized fear during the
00:51:48.840
pandemic it could simply be they wanted people to follow the rules and they knew the rules they
00:51:53.060
were imposing were a huge form of potentially necessary or unnecessary social engineering
00:52:00.360
It could be that they panicked about the virus themselves, you know, the teeth of the crisis and they panicked.
00:52:06.860
So they threw away all the old pandemic plans and did something brand new, copying China.
0.99
00:52:12.460
It can also be that there could be vested interests at play.
00:52:15.580
I mean, maybe it serves some people's interests.
00:52:18.280
You know, there's been some scrutiny about contracts that haven't gone through the correct tendering process.
00:52:24.420
You know, you could have a coalescence here of cock up
00:52:27.180
and the road to hell being paved with the good intentions
0.62
00:52:43.420
While the house is on fire, you don't know what started it.
00:52:52.560
Do you think we're ever going to get back to normal,
00:52:54.340
as in the old normal, as in where we used to be in 2019?
00:53:07.100
The fact that I'm referring to normality as the old normal.
00:53:12.060
I mean, I'm quite interested in the term the new normal.
00:53:15.260
I'd quite like to do, I'd like somebody to pay me
00:53:17.240
to do a really good study into this actually about how it spread.
00:53:20.760
Was it a form of linguistic contagion? Was there some pandemic plan that was secretly passed around
00:53:25.540
governments? Why did they all start saying new normal so early? I put the date in my book,
00:53:31.380
I can't remember off the top of my head, but Dominic Raab used the term the new normal within
00:53:34.360
a few weeks of the first lockdown. Now I'm very alert to language and at the time I thought,
00:53:38.660
well why would you say that? This sounds horrific, what do you mean? What new normal? I want to go
00:53:42.960
back to real normal and I didn't understand then and I still don't why you'd use a term that implies
00:53:49.760
that a whole way of being has passed. You don't use the new normal unless it's to signify some
00:53:55.020
new epoch. So I don't know what that means. That would be an interesting thing to explore. I'm
00:53:59.900
open-minded. But I don't want old normal back, actually. I know. I shot you. I don't. Because
00:54:06.660
I don't think it was good enough. It wasn't robust enough. Something that I've sort of grieved over
00:54:12.280
a little bit is not the freedoms that were taken away. It's the fact that I really didn't have
00:54:17.700
freedom if it could be taken away so easily and I think that we should be looking at a sort of a
00:54:25.080
bigger picture about how we make people cherish freedom and democracy and parliamentary process
00:54:31.640
and we need much much better more robust systems in place for future pandemics or crises
00:54:39.280
I don't think old normal was quite doing the job if it's gone so easily and it's still not back
00:54:47.700
I quite agree with you because when they can abolish
00:54:50.500
or outlaw protests and there doesn't seem to be a murmur about it
00:54:56.940
and then you saw those awful footage of police officers
00:55:01.240
kneeling on women's back, that was the only time it seemed
0.96
00:55:04.440
that the people started to wake up as to what was happening.
00:55:15.480
It's horrific, but it's good that at least people started talking about the right to protest.
00:55:20.380
There are a lot of really essential basic human rights that were withheld from people.
00:55:25.500
And you could argue that was necessary during a pandemic or not.
00:55:28.360
But it's how fragile our relationship to those rights appears.
00:55:32.200
So worship, education, protest, even elections, you know, the local elections were cancelled, which was shocking, I thought.
00:55:42.120
It was. It was. And what do you, are you optimistic about the future?
00:55:45.360
where is this all going? Because the concern you've just articulated is my biggest concern
00:55:50.580
about all of this. We've opened not one and not two and not five and not even 10 different Pandora's
00:55:59.520
boxes. Every aspect of the relationship between the citizen and our representatives has been
00:56:07.360
completely and dramatically changed in a very short period of time without any democratic
00:56:12.880
scrutiny whatsoever and so the question for me we started with this but the question for me going
00:56:19.380
forward is are you optimistic that we're not just going to live in a completely different era now
00:56:25.360
in which everything we used to believe about representative democracy about government about
00:56:30.980
our rights and freedoms it's just not going to be the same anymore are you optimistic that
00:56:34.980
that we'll make it through this to a better normal i don't know i oscillate and i don't pretend to
00:56:41.640
have a crystal ball for me july 19th isn't freedom day i've got no expectation of freedom
00:56:46.700
on july 19th i still i think we'll see a return of some privileges you know the privilege to go
00:56:53.180
to a restaurant or to a bar or to gather at someone else's house in greater numbers than
00:56:57.280
whatever it is i actually can't keep the rules in my head anymore because they've changed so much
00:57:01.200
i get i get lost on the numbers but i think we'll see the return of some uh privileges because
00:57:06.480
they're not freedom if you have to buy them, negotiate, plead, exchange. It's a stepping
00:57:12.400
stone to just move towards a better version of freedom. The thing that I think we need
00:57:18.200
is public consultation on the use of behavioural science, because it's behavioural science
00:57:22.340
that made people so frightened, it made them comply with the rules, and it accounts for
00:57:27.220
where we are right now, where people are, you know, the anxiety about the 19th and some
00:57:31.540
restrictions being lifted is palpable and that is not proportionate to the deaths or to the
00:57:38.340
hospitalisations. I mean cases are a function of the amount of testing and shouldn't be the measure
00:57:45.440
but they are. It's a big number isn't it? The big numbers are the scary ones. So what I think we
00:57:51.880
need as well as the inevitable Covid inquiry is a public consultation and inquiry into the
00:57:56.540
government's reliance on behavioural science. There have been various calls in the past for
00:58:00.500
consultation and they haven't happened and perhaps nobody thought it mattered while they were just
00:58:05.940
you know quietly making cigarette packaging plain or encouraging us to pay our tax returns on time
00:58:12.280
or making us lock up the biscuit tin but this time we were locked up and so it matters I think it's
00:58:17.760
time to to look at what they're doing. I think it is time to look at what they're doing do you think
00:58:23.200
it was quite sinister that Boris Johnson in that particular press conference talked about personal
00:58:28.340
responsibility, almost as a way that if things do go wrong, the fault is not on the government,
00:58:33.940
it's on the individual or the general public. I liked him talking about personal responsibility.
00:58:39.580
I think that the British public should have been trusted all along. You know, the alternative to
00:58:43.920
scaring people witless to encourage a lockdown would be to say, well, there are certain things,
00:58:48.320
like really big gatherings, stadia, we need to apply some sensible measures, but
00:58:53.000
there's this really dangerous disease. It's particularly dangerous to these categories
00:58:57.820
of people and we would like to ask you to be mindful of this, this and this, would we not
00:59:02.580
have done it? I would have done. I think most people would have been, should have been trusted
00:59:08.120
with honesty and with personal responsibility. What I thought was quite something in that speech
00:59:15.060
was he said, we're changing the tools to control human behaviour. That's the bit that woke me up.
00:59:22.380
Tools to control human behaviour. It's just out there in the open. They just talk about it quite
00:59:25.960
quite openly now. And what do you think he means by that? Well, he specifically said away from
00:59:31.140
legal restrictions and towards personal responsibility, which is going in the right
00:59:34.440
direction. But it's an honest labelling of tools to control human behaviour. What are all the tools?
00:59:39.380
I mean, they're in my book. Let's talk about them. Let's get some expert witnesses talking
00:59:43.080
about them. Let's gather better evidence. Let's find out who behind these tools. How much does
00:59:47.520
it cost us, the taxpayer? What are we spending on behavioural science in each government department
00:59:51.380
and on marketing campaigns why is it not in manifestos and what's the collateral damage
00:59:57.120
which you've talked about there's another bit of this before we wrap up that i find very interesting
01:00:02.200
you've alluded to it and it's a conversation that's uh certainly unhaveable on television or
01:00:07.500
in in the newspapers but the reality of this virus this this has been acknowledged it obviously
01:00:13.080
is particularly deadly to the elderly but in terms of things that you yourself can control
0.88
01:00:17.900
the one well not the one but a couple of things we know is obesity and your overall immune system
01:00:26.180
are two things that can provide either very very bad outcomes or very good outcomes depending on
01:00:33.220
whether those are things that are under control and I we have seen a tremendous amount of messaging
01:00:38.560
of the negative type we I don't think I've ever seen an ad from the government about what I can do
01:00:45.880
to protect myself from COVID other than stay at home.
01:01:01.000
Yet we know that of the things that you can control,
01:01:03.340
which is probably what all of us want to know about,
01:01:14.180
so in terms of the interview you've done many interviews for the book was that ever discussed
01:01:19.200
and and what are your thoughts on why that's never happened i don't know it's baffling um
01:01:24.340
isn't it it is baffling and it's it's something that's grated on me since the beginning of the
01:01:28.560
epidemic so there's been discussion about whether vitamin d helps not but we know it helps with
01:01:33.860
other respiratory diseases obviously good nutrition exercise sleep um and it's been known
01:01:41.720
since very early that obesity appears to be a comorbidity, diabetes, hypertensive disorder.
01:01:48.620
So there's a lot of things that people could do to improve their overall health. And we could
01:01:52.760
be working on that before this winter. So I don't really know. I don't know why that hasn't been the
01:01:59.000
focus. But it's worse than that, of course, because fear and stress have psychopathological
01:02:05.960
outcomes. You know, it affects the immune system and it can affect overall physical health.
01:02:09.980
so frightening people could have also made people sicker literally physically sicker not just affect
01:02:16.860
mental health it's very true uh laura we could talk about this for a very long time and probably
01:02:23.100
just get more and more depressed as we do uh but listen we're going to ask you some questions for
01:02:27.080
our locals but before we do we've got one final question for you which is always what's the one
01:02:31.000
thing we're not talking about but we really should be well we're going on holiday this summer
01:02:39.000
No, that's what we should be talking about, shouldn't we?
01:02:44.200
Well, Francis and I have both been on holiday already.
01:02:57.440
The moment it looks as if it was going to open,
01:03:04.480
because I don't know when it's going to shut again.
01:03:11.560
There's a good little bit of information for you.
01:03:14.560
Anyway, Laura, thank you so much for coming on.
01:03:18.420
I recommend people get it and check it out for themselves.
01:03:28.240
And on Twitter and Instagram, I'm at Bear Reality.
01:03:33.840
fantastic thank you so much for coming on the show thank you all for watching we're going to
01:03:38.200
do our locals questions in a second but take care we'll see you very soon with another fabulous
01:03:42.640
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