Daily Covid-19 briefings expose the cover up and misinformation by UK government

Most commentators have pointed out the fact that government Minister after government Minister has failed to answer questions at the Daily Briefings. Earlier this week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock even stated: “Well, I’m going to not answer the first question….” which could be commended for honesty were it not blatantly appalling and opaque.

Commentators have also noted the constant use of the non-specific term ‘ramping up’ to excuse the lack of testing and delivery of PPE to our brave health workers and also to encourage the public to believe the government is actually doing something on those issues and not still following their fateful and globally discredited ‘herd immunity’ strategy. Especially in relation to issues like PPE for NHS workers, it has not been hard to see the disconnect between the government’s reassuring message and the realities reported by NHS staff on the frontline (even despite the gagging orders and threats to their careers if they speak out).

It has also been noticeable how, since the reappointment of the Australian PR bods who helped manage Tory Election Campaign messaging, the Daily Briefings have become less open and far more an exercise in government propaganda. Any possible successes are highlighted and the truth and deficiencies go unmentioned. The Briefings are now noticeably more polished, more ‘managed’…. more deceitful.

I’m always fascinated by semantics and also noticeable has been the increasing use of aggrandising words to ‘impress’ the public and, again, convince us of the government’s competence. The greatest example of this came after days of fierce criticism over the government’s lack of testing with Matt Hancock’s unveiling of ‘The Five Pillars’ to the government’s testing strategy. ‘Pillars?!’ It’s a Five-Point Plan, Matt. Of course, one of those points has since proven harder than anticipated to deliver as the much heralded 3.5 million antibody tests the government bought don’t work! That’s OK though: a government spokesperson said: “the orders that we placed will be cancelled and WHEREVER POSSIBLE we will recover the costs.”

Of course, the related pledge to reach 100K tests per day by the end of April now looks unlikely given that the government (despite blatantly trying to obscure this fact) intended 75% of them to be the antibody (as opposed to the antigen) test.

That’s the trouble with ‘Pillars’….. take one or two away and the building might just collapse.

We’re also constantly told that the government is ‘following the science’….. but which science is something they have kept hidden. That statement encourages us all to believe that, right from the start, they have followed the scientific advice of the medical and virology experts. However, we know they have not followed the scientific advice of the experts from the World Health Organisation – especially regarding testing and contact tracing and in pursuing the ‘officially’ abandoned ‘herd immunity’ strategy. It is well-documented that that strategy does not follow any standard Public Health approaches.

So, is it instead that, as many observers believe, the ‘science’ they have CHOSEN to follow (at least initially) has been that of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team (otherwise known as the ‘Nudge Unit’) who specialise in enabling the government to hone their policies and propaganda messages based on how the public will perceive them and act?

Other things worth noting from the Daily Briefings include:

– Deliberately not mentioning the daily death totals – they now give the cumulative total. This, for example, ensures the public were mostly unaware that yesterday’s death toll was the worst yet at 786 or that it was the third-highest in the world behind only the USA and France. There is also no daily death chart – despite charts for lots of things including such riveting things as daily transport usage…. something over which, on a daily basis, the nation is surely holding its breath.

– The semantics (or just propaganda) used when talking about the Daily Number of Cases Chart: if numbers have not risen, we hear of ‘green shoots’, ‘plateaus’ and ‘the government strategy may be paying off’. However, if numbers have risen, it’s because we’re doing more testing!

As a youth worker, I have spent much of the last 30 years being told, nay ‘forced’, by government to measure our work not just by inputs (the resources and processes) but by outcomes (effects). This often proves difficult given that our work is educational, developmental, preventative and designed to achieve transformative results in the long-term. So, imagine my surprise to see the government’s Daily Briefings constituting an endless stream of inputs without an outcome in sight!

Yes, we’re told how many millions of items of PPE the government have ordered, for example, but not how many have actually arrived at hospitals nor the percentage of NHS staff that now have access to the correct PPE! As we now know full well in regard to ventilators, ‘ordered’ does not mean arrived, especially when medical/NHS suppliers and EU Procurement Schemes are ignored in favour of awarding contracts to the makers of vacuums and tractors who happen to be Tory donors!

Another example of the ‘input’ is the Chancellor’s announcement that small businesses can access new loans. For many, the outcomes are that the banks are charging up to 30% interest and so they can’t afford to obtain one.

And finally, we have yesterday’s Briefing when the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor (who had previously worked for Glaxo Smithkline for 12 years), whilst answering a question about the way Covid-19 deaths were counted, tried desperately hard to not mention that deaths in care homes were not counted – they are counted and reported separately by the ONS. The government are not keen for people to know of this because then people would know that our death toll is higher than officially reported in the Briefings and because the public might suspect there is an ulterior motive to the growing number of reports of people in care homes being refused hospital admission and treatment and being sent back to their care homes to pass away.

Thankfully, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty (who has a background in public health and communicable diseases) seems altogether more honest and he quickly confirmed the facts.

So, I hope that when scrutinising our government’s response and the Daily Briefings, we will all be aware of the semantics, the unspoken, the messaging, the propaganda and the inputs and (lack of) outcomes.

Tom Lane