Why the behavioural scientists need to get out of our teenagers’ brains.
Teenagers have endured a blitzkrieg of nudge, shaming and threats.
By Laura Dodsworth, Oct 11 2021
The last thing our teenagers need, after a terrible year and a half, is the onslaught of behavioural science subliminally affecting their brains.
The JCVI (The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisations) deliberated carefully before deciding against a mass roll-out of the UK’s successful vaccination program to this age group. They decided there was only a marginal benefit to teenagers combined with uncertainty about the potential and unknown harms of the vaccine. Nonetheless the four nations’ Chief Medical Officers decided the vaccine should be delivered through a mass programme in schools.
If the JCVI found this a difficult decision, how are teenagers and their parents supposed to decide what the right thing to do is?
Even more troubling, how are teens and their parents supposed to make an informed decision about whether to have the Covid-19 vaccine after an 18 month long blitzkrieg of behavioural science?
As I uncovered in the research for my book, A State of Fear, the government leant on fear-mongering and ‘nudges’ (psychological manipulation to alter behaviour) to encourage the population to comply with lockdown rules.
But informed consent – the ethical bedrock of modern medicine – means being able to make a rational decision about a medical intervention, unclouded by emotions or subliminal manipulation.
Last year, public health messaging took a shameful turn when teenagers and children were chided not to kill granny. The messaging was used by the government, from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, to local government, such as Preston City Council, and it reverberated around national and local media. Dr Daisy Fancourt, the Associate Professor in Behavioural Science and Health at UCL and runs The Covid Social Study which provides findings to SAGE, told me “don’t kill granny” was “good for compliance” because “appeals to collective conscience are effective”. That’s putting it mildly – exhorting children not to kill their grandparents was simultaneously insensitive to those who had lost loved ones and heaped a jaw-slackening burden of fear, guilt and shame on the others…
Great that Laura Dodsworth is still on the case, and outing all the propagandising and bullying that’s going on. Her book STATE OF FEAR is absolutely essential reading for all those concerned with the truth.