The COVID-19 Crisis playbook was described 13 years ago by Christopher Booker and Richard North in their book, "Scared to Death"

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"In the past twenty years, Western society in general and Britain in particular has been in the grip of a remarkable and very dangerous psychological phenomenon. Again and again since the 1980s we have seen the rise of some great fear, centred on a mysterious new threat.."

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... "new threat to human health and wellbeing. As a result, we are told, large numbers of people will suffer or die. Salmonella in eggs; listeria in cheese; BSE in beef; dioxins in poultry; the ‘Millennium Bug’; DDT; nitrate in water; vitamin B6; ‘Satanic’ child abuse..."

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"... lead in petrol and computers; passive smoking; asbestos; SARS; Asian bird flu – the list is seemingly endless.

Indeed, we are currently in the grip of the greatest such fear of all: that of a warming of the world’s climate which, we are officially told, ..."

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".. could well put an end to much of civilized life as we know it. The price we have paid for such panics has been immense; most notably the colossal financial costs arising from the means society has chosen to defend itself from these threats."

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"Yet, again and again, we have seen how it eventually emerged that the fear was largely or wholly misplaced. The threat of disaster came to be seen as having been no more than what we call a ‘scare’."

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"The purpose of this book is to show how there has been a common pattern behind each of these scares – one that has been strikingly consistent. Each was based on what appeared at the time to be scientific evidence that was widely accepted. "

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"Each has inspired obsessive coverage by the media. Each has then provoked a massive response from politicians and officials, imposing new laws that inflicted enormous economic and social damage. But eventually the scientific reasoning on which the panic was based ..."

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"... has been found to be fundamentally flawed. Either the scare originated in some genuine threat that had then become wildly exaggerated, or the danger was found never to have existed at all. By now, however, the damage has been done."

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"The costs have amounted in some cases to billions, even hundreds of billions, of pounds, imposing an enormous hidden drain on the economy. Yet almost all of this money has been spent, it turns out, to no purpose."

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When we examine the pattern behind these scares we find further elements which each has in common.

a) • The source of the supposed danger must be something universal, to which almost anyone in the population might be exposed,

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b) • The nature of the danger it poses must be novel, a threat that has never appeared in this form before.

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c) While the scientific basis for the scare must seem plausible, the threat must also contain a powerful element of uncertainty. It must in some way be ill-defined, maximising the opportunity for alarmist speculation as to the damage it might cause.

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d) Society’s response to the threat must be disproportionate. It is this more than anything which defines a true ‘scare’; that, even where the threat is not wholly imaginary, the response to it is eventually seen to have been out of all proportion to its reality.

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In the unfolding of any scare, we then see how two competing forces are at work. On one hand, there are the ‘pushers’: those whose interest is to promote the scare and to talk it up, such as scientists. for whom it provides the promise..."

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...of winning public attention or further funding. On the other there are the ‘blockers’: those whose interest is to downplay it, such as an industry it threatens to damage, or a government under pressure to be seen to be taking action.

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" .... Two professions that play a particularly crucial part in the unleashing of a scare are the politicians and the media.

... Certainly the most dangerous moment in any scare comes when the pushers carry the day ..."

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"... and the politicians and their officials unleash their regulatory response, since it is then that the real damage is caused...there are few things most newspaper or television editors relish more than the chance to take part in a full-blown scare drama,

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"... In this their closest collaborators are those scientists for whom the lure of publicity or the need to justify funding have come to overrule their scientific objectivity."

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Read the rest for yourself - it is remarkably prescient

COVID-19 fits the pattern to a T.

God help us all from well-meaning politicians and egotistical scientists