Elements of Propaganda in the Western World’s Political, Public Health, and Media Narratives of 2020-2022
Summary of our book chapter published in "The COVID-19 Pandemic" by Ethics Press and a few current examples of state propaganda and media terror
Thanks to the pandemic and my public dissent with many aspects of the response, I have come to know a whole universe of bright and beautiful people that I would have never met under old-normal circumstances. One of them, Prof. Oliver Hirsch, had written a summary of Henry Conserva’s “Propaganda Techniques” for a German alternative news site in December 2021 (“Learning to Recognize Propaganda”, Club der Klaren Worte). The idea arose to join forces and write an extended version in English, replete with examples of state propaganda and media terrorism in the Covidian Era.
As an aside, Oliver has also published important peer-reviewed articles asking “Is a Mask That Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards?” and demonstrating “Methodological problems of SARS-CoV-2 rapid point-of-care tests when used in mass testing”. I have previously mentioned the mask paper, which was a scoping review focused on the adverse effects of mask-wearing, and am pleased to report that their team has just released the preprint of a systematic review on “Physio-metabolic and clinical consequences of wearing face masks”, which confirms the mask-induced exhaustion syndrome (MIES) they inferred from the scoping review.
Responding to a call for book chapters from Ethics Press in Cambridge, UK, Oliver and I submitted an abstract titled “Elements of Propaganda in the Political and Media Narratives of 2020/2021” in early January 2022, an extended abstract in February, a complete manuscript in March, and a revised 7,500-word document in May, with the enhanced title “Elements of Propaganda in the Western World’s Political, Public Health, and Media Narratives of 2020-2022”. The book was published in late September 2022 as part of a two-volume collection, which is represented by the LinkedIn account “The COVID-19 Collection”. Using the account, the editors currently profile a different chapter each week. The volumes “The COVID-19 Pandemic: Ethical Challenges and Considerations”, lead-edited by Dr. Eleftheria Egel, and “Ethical Implications of COVID-19 Management: Evaluating the Aftershock”, lead-edited by Dr. Cheryl Patton, are available from the publisher — try discount code “COVID33” for a significant rebate.
The editors set out to overcome the polarized debates of the pandemic, present the complex and multi-faceted nuances of COVID facts and narratives, and open up a space for sincere discourse and in-between perspectives. The resulting broad range of contributions is exemplified by comparing our chapter with the preceding chapter within Part 1 Narratives: The (Mis)Information Tightrope of “The COVID-19 Pandemic”.
In “COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media“, Padda et al. “consider the ethical and legal issues pertaining to qualitative analysis of social media posts and the pages and hashtags on which they appear, and the degree to which COVID-19 misinformation on social media could and should be regulated by governments and/or by the social media platforms themselves”. The group’s over-arching goal is to develop “an artificial intelligence (machine-learning) tool to assist social media platforms, online service providers and government agencies in identifying and responding to misinformation on social media”.
Meanwhile, Hirsch & Rinner “…illustrate and discuss elements of propaganda found in communications from government, public health administration, and the mainstream media during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to early 2022. The examples … include elements of simplification and faulty analogies, emotional appeals and scapegoating, and manipulating numbers. We discuss the use of propaganda from an ethical perspective with particular attention to fear narratives, the weakness of the underlying evidence, and the use of moral appeals. We conclude that the use of propaganda techniques to support the COVID-19 pandemic response was unethical, since the broad scope and uniformity of the response measures were not sufficiently established by scientific evidence or by the facts on the ground.”
Our chapter is currently viewable in full length through Google Book’s preview. After introducing the study of propaganda with reference to key authors Ellul, Bernays, Le Bon, and Meerloo, we present examples of propaganda in the medical, pharma, and public health context from both before and during this pandemic. The core of the chapter is a detailed illustration and analysis of three propaganda techniques:
1. Simplification and faulty analogies
Much of the West’s pandemic response was based on simplistic assumptions. The effectiveness of face masks as a public health measure was never convincingly established, yet masking continues to be advised and is occasionally still required. I have never touched a surgical mask in my life, but yesterday I noticed a large display at the drugstore and took out a package to confirm the caution label that I have seen posted many times on social media. And sure enough, it does recommend using these masks against dust particles, not respiratory viruses. The faulty analogy between the two settings lies in the manifold smaller size of virions and the flow of aerosols through gaps.
In other recent news, Canada’s state broadcaster wrote an incredibly one-sided, almost defamatory article about a “controversial medical officer” who “made comments questioning masking and vaccine mandates”. Dr. Matt Strauss has been advocating, from the perspective of a practicing ICU physician, for evidence-based pandemic response and hospital management since the beginning of the crisis — and for dropping restrictions that demonstrably caused more harm than good. Most disturbingly, the CBC cites Dr. Thomas Piggott, “CEO of Peterborough Public Health”, stating unchallenged that “masking is an intervention that comes with absolutely no known evidence of harms, and that's the reality.” In light of Oliver’s published work cited above, this claim is not just simplistic but outright false!
Other examples from our chapter include some of the much-debated catchphrases, including “two weeks to flatten the curve” or “vaccines are our only way out of the pandemic”. The deliberate marketing of the mRNA genetics-based therapeutics as “vaccines” is another simplification and faulty analogy. It was known to industry and regulators that mass administration of “cellular gene therapy” would not be acceptable to the majority of people (see the recording of a pharma rep saying as much in the second half of this post) and that the available products were not going to stop transmission (see the recording of a European bureaucrat confirming in the second half of this post that you’d need a “completely different [vaccine] design” for that purpose).
2. Emotional appeals and scape-goating
For this propaganda technique, we refer to the health-care and essential-worker “hero” narrative and the ridiculous German government’s “special hero” campaign, which celebrated the laptop class’s courageous bumming around at home. In the French and Anglo-American cultural spheres, the “hero” narrative is more readily associated with the “war against the virus” storyline. In this regard, I recommend my colleague Dr. Julien Beillard’s piece in the currently inactive Toronto Moon, “The Star's War: Delusional editorial misses its target entirely”, from December 2021/February 2022.
Very recently, when media pundits made out a tripledemic of respiratory illness among children, health advice on NBC and (social-)media propositions of righteous public doctors combined the emotional appeal to “protect our kids” with the scape-goating of common-sensers, suggesting that everyone ought once again to mask up for extended hygiene theatre and avoid contact with “unvaccinated individuals”.
In the chapter, we also bring up the persecution of dissenting physicians in Austria, Canada, Germany, and Italy. Ironically, in light of the above juxtaposition of chapters, we also talk about social media surveillance and question the feasibility of automated monitoring given the complex nature of the COVID-19 topic. Lastly, we exemplify the efforts of politicians in Canada and Germany to brand protesters such as the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa or the Monday Walks in many German cities as heretics. Average citizens were varyingly called “enemies of the state”, “fringe minority”, or “not part of our society”. The scape-goating is sadly ongoing, at least here in Ontario, with disciplinary hearings for honest doctors and continued, baseless workplace vaccination mandates in many cities and some corporations.
3. Manipulating numbers
The COVID numbers game is what first got me interested in “doing my own research” on the pandemic. It also is the area in which I can claim a bit of expertise, as my specialty within geography is spatial data analysis/visualization and decision support systems. Examples for manipulating numbers as a propaganda technique start with the COVID-19 “infections” determined by the flawed PCR test. I can proudly say that I blogged about “The Saga of False-Positive COVID-19 Tests” as early as September 2020 and may have been one of the first to write about it in the legacy media in “Canada's current pandemic response isn't supported by the facts” in December 2020. On the basis of PCR-confirmed “cases”, the German government developed “incidence rates” to determine the imposition and severity of mobility restrictions. Oliver’s second article cited above demonstrates that these rates are highly volatile and unsuitable for policy-making.
The constant presentation of COVID-19 death counts, exaggerated by including deaths from other causes with a coincidental finding of COVID infection, and lacking the context of high average age-at-death and often fatal comorbidity burden, did the job to drive the fear narrative and coerce the population into compliance with pandemic restrictions. The same goes for the COVID-19 case-fatality rate and infection-fatality rate that kept being revised downward through the pandemic, and for the vaccine efficacy from the Pfizer trials, which was posted as a relative risk reduction of 95% when it should also have been presented as an absolute risk reduction of less than 1%, according to established public health communication guidelines.
All of these numbers were manipulated in one way or another so that they fit within the Western COVID-19 propaganda machine. I am somewhat of a contrarian among contrarians as I still believe that this manipulation was often done in good faith by public health officials and even journalists. As believers of the (naturally!?) emerging fear narrative, they did all they could to frighten the rest of us into compliance, for the “common good”, rather than allowing for informed dissent. Intent or not, the promoters of fear narratives, segregation, and hate must face their day of reckoning, perhaps most humanely imposed in the form of re-education in the principles of respect, diversity of opinion, and open public debate.