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Fear stops people thinking straight and it’s easy to whip up terror around variants – with hundreds of thousands circulating, there will always be a new one. Want to be a SAGE-style media darling? This guide is all you need. . .
1. Learn a basic fact of virology: there are hundreds of thousands of variants of COVID-19, many yet to be discovered.
2. Realise that it’s normal for some of these to be better at spreading than others, but that a terrified population doesn’t understand this.
3. Find one and give it a name.
Hot Tip: A good idea is to name it after a country with a struggling health system where you can easily get footage of swamped hospitals. India is a great example: though the country was well down the list of countries worst affected by COVID-19, it’s overstretched health system provided the perfect images for international TV.
4. Call yourself an Expert.
Hot Tip: It helps if you have the title Professor – it means that you don’t need actual qualifications in medicine, virology or epidemiology to be given an uncritical platform by broadcasters.
5. Ensure that your friends in Ofcom have told broadcasters that they are not allowed to report any data or expert who might suggest that you are scaremongering.
6. Announce that you have found a dangerous new variant: your 'scariant'.
7. Express your fear that the vaccine may be less effective against it: don’t worry if there’s no evidence.
Bonus Point: Your friends in the pharmaceutical industry will happily promise to come up with special variant jabs.
8. Use all the tricks of behavioural science to terrify people so they can’t think straight.
9. Do more testing for variants than most of the rest of the world combined, ensuring that there’s plenty of evidence of your scariant spreading in the UK.
Important: Start work on the next scariant ASAP! Don’t give people time to see that the first didn’t amount to anything before you hit them with the next.
10. Job done.
Congratulations!
You’ve scared the population witless, prolonged the crisis in the NHS, devastated more businesses, worsened the growing mental health crisis, stopped international travel, harmed the development of millions of children, kept broadcast restrictions and curbs on freedom of speech in place and guaranteed that normal life will not resume.
www.theglobeandmail.com
