In 2002, Iain Duncan Smith notoriously declared: “Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man.” It might have been a rather poor self-description, but it serves as a perfect representation of the chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty.
For nearly two days he quietly answered questions put to him at the Covid inquiry; his tone uniformly reasonable, his demeanour consistently mild. Whitty’s former deputy Jonathan Van-Tam, who followed his erstwhile boss at the inquiry, summed him up perfectly at the inquiry. “I’m the one who chases the ball,” he said. “Chris is the one to look at the ball first and makes a more qualified and thoughtful decision about whether it was worth chasing.” So if ever Whitty should even amble ballwards, you know to take it very seriously indeed.
There was one point in particular when the chief medical officer took aim, when he was asked about those who proposed the so-called herd immunity strategy of allowing the virus to spread freely among healthy people, thereby building immunity in the population to a level where transmission would grind to a halt.
Whitty replied that there was so much chatter about herd immunity by people who “had at best half-understood the issue” that the result was utter confusion. A little knowledge, he said, was a “dangerous thing”. From Whitty this was far more excoriating a condemnation than the foul-mouthed insults of others exposed by the inquiry.
Whitty is undoubtedly right in pointing to the confused nature of much of the debate around Covid when people began proclaiming on technical areas beyond their fields of expertise. He was acute in his observations when others strayed on to his own ground. But he was less acute when he strayed on to the ground of others.
This was most obvious in his use of the concept of “behavioural fatigue” in early March 2020 – the idea that people would not be able to abide by Covid restrictions, which should therefore be delayed lest they lose their effectiveness when most needed.
To his considerable credit, Whitty was highly critical of this intervention when questioned about it at the inquiry, accepting it as a mistake and accepting full personal responsibility. If only others in leadership had been so forthcoming in owning up to their errors.
But, as his subsequent comments made clear, the issue is not that Whitty sought to cover up his mistakes, but that he still does not understand how he was mistaken and why that was so serious for the entire government Covid response.
The real problem with the idea of “behavioural fatigue” is that it conflates how people feel with what they do, playing into a notion that people are fundamentally frail and unable to cope with the measures necessary to contain Covid. There is no doubt that people found these measures hard and grew tired of them. Even early on, many people were suffering from the lockdown. But, overwhelmingly, they did not give up on it.
In fact, far from being frail, people were remarkably resilient over a very long period. This was greatly facilitated by the way in which people came together, thinking and acting as a community, supporting each other in countless ways. Apart from the million or so in England who volunteered to help the NHS, more than 12 million people volunteered to help as part of the roughly 4,000 mutual aid groups that sprang up across the country in 2020. The reality of the pandemic was not one of individual frailty but of collective resilience.
If people did break the rules it was less to do with fatigue than with government failures. Further into the pandemic response, No 10 broke down that early sense of community and social support by shifting official language towards an emphasis on “personal responsibility”; it failed to provide the support people needed to isolate when infected; and time and time again, it encouraged people to underestimate Covid risks with talk of “freedom day” (in both 2021 and 2022), accompanied by premature declarations that it was all over.
The concept of “behavioural fatigue” paints the public as the problem. It also takes the spotlight off the many failures of government and social systems. It suggests that the tragedy of the pandemic is that the attempts of a valiant government to protect us are fatally limited by the deficiencies of the public psyche, when the one thing that emerges day by day ever more clearly from the inquiry is that precisely the opposite is true.
So long as there is a failure to understand the reasons why “behavioural fatigue” is so dangerous an idea – far more than a technical issue or a matter of messaging – we won’t be in a position to rectify these profound errors next time round. Nor will we learn how to build the sense of community and solidarity that is so crucial to adherence. Chris Whitty was entirely right in quietly and effectively skewering those who seek to guide policy on the basis of matters of which they have limited knowledge. That is why we need people with a full understanding of the behavioural issues guiding those at the heart of government.
Stephen Reicher is a professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews
