2021-08-23
I'm thinking that we all remember the government campaign last January featuring full-page advertisements in national and local press showing big pictures of distressed patients in breathing masks, and making what many believe is a wholly unfounded assertion that "1 in 3 people who have Covid-19 have no symptoms and are spreading it without knowing".
I think there cannot be anybody in the Kingdom that did not see this campaign. I even complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about it (and two months later received a long-winded generic reply that studiously avoided addressing the precise point that I made, which was that the claim of asymptomatic transmission on that scale had no foundation in science).
This campaign was clearly an unprincipled attempt to scare us all into submission by using emotional blackmail.
I wasn't by myself in this thinking. Dr Gary Sidley and others wrote to the British Psychological Society in January to request their views on whether this campaign could be considered ethical. This was evidently a tricky question that demanded long and careful consideration, but almost six months later on 1st July the BPS responded.
The Daily Sceptic has the details.
Personally speaking, I would suggest that regardless of ethics, people who think for themselves already have the facility to check out such campaigns and come to their own conclusions. The world is an unfair place - it behoves those who would survive and thrive to take responsibility for choosing their sources of information wisely.
To blindly take everything that our governments tell us at face value is a sure recipe for descent into slavery through belief in propaganda, and it isn't as though there are no historical precedents to warn us.
For what it may be worth, my own approach to any messaging that blatantly sets out to tug on our heart-strings is decidedly leery.
