
BEHAVIOUR
WHEEL
SAGE PSYCHOLOGISTS
LOCKDOWN was never about following the science. It was and always will be about following The Narrative.
This would explain why, of those on the SAGE committee not directly employed by Government Departments (all young Professors with newly minted OBEs) there are so few epidemiologists, virologists and immunologists. There are, however, plenty of mathematicians and experimental psychologists who between them have published papers on subjects like how best the public can be persuaded, incentivized, coerced and engineered to become more compliant using a Behavioral Change Wheel (BCW) aimed at increased and sustained adherence. For the optimists who think severe COVID-19 won’t happen to them (understandably considering the estimated WHO survival rate of 99.5-99.998%) a quick spin of the Behavioral Change Wheel could make them think again. A King’s College study concluded that ‘Future research is needed on the implications of comparatively optimistic thinking for future compliance with government guidelines on managing COVID-19’.
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And it’s not just Boris being SAGED. BBC, ITV and Channel Four News perhaps less in need of coercion (after all, bad news sells) are all on board, spoon-feeding the dystopian narrative to a nightly captive audience who feast their eyeballs on flickering images of overstretched morgues, coffin shortages and eye-watering fatalities as they work their way through yet another case of wine in their brand new dressing gowns. A 24/7 drip-fed tsunami of bad news on warp speed that never lets up. And for those who dare venture to The Outside, throw a snowball, enjoy coffee with a friend or – God forbid – sit on a park bench - The Narrative suddenly mutates. Thought you were enjoying some harmless risk-free fun? Wrong. You are a granny killer, a plague-infested jogger, an anti-vaxxer who not only disables 5G masts at weekends, but does so without even social distancing.
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There are of course dissenters, doctors, lawyers, virologists and epidemiologists from Harvard to Stanford who – based on historical studies of Coronaviruses - maintain the 2020 Coronavirus has largely come and gone and that emerging data, incorrectly attributed to COVID-19, is as a direct result of the vaccine rollout.
Many of these scientists have been ‘YouTube-discredited’ as though YouTube – a company whose core interest is financial – is now the new standard bearer for ethics and decency, trumping The Magna Carta and The Bill of Rights. Those who challenge The Narrative are cancelled, publically discredited and shamed. A recent Rolling Stone article outed Jessica Biel, Jim Carey and Rob Schneider as Anti-Vaxxers (or anti gene-therapy-ists if you want to be precise) even though they were not against vaccines in general, just the mandatory imposition of them.
For those whose dissent reaches a wide audience, there is ‘pre-bunking’. Pre-bunkers use the same coercive techniques as mainstream media; impersonation, emotional exploitation, polarisation, conspiracy, discredit and trolling. By striking first, the debunker can poison – in advance - any well of information that challenges The Narrative. So anyone with a different take on the numbers (numbers readily available to all on the ONS, the WHO and CDC websites) suddenly becomes a Covid-hoaxer, a conspiracy theorist, an anti-lockdowner, a right-winger and a 5G arsonist. Pre-bunkers use fake news to combat fake news - or dissent - depending which side of the fence you’re on. But when does open debate become misinformation? Perhaps when there’s something to hide.
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The irony is, none of this information is hidden if anyone bothered to look. All the information anyone needs to make their own mind up is readily available at the touch of a button, in black, white and colour on Government websites, the WHO, the CDC and the pharmaceutical companies themselves. The Pfizer release document informs you that ‘Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is an unapproved vaccine’ (it has been approved for emergency use) and that ‘in clinical trials, approximately 20,000 individuals 16 years of age and older have received at least 1 dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine’. It adds: '...the duration of protection against COVID-19 is currently unknown’.
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But we'll stick it in your arm regardless.