July 27, 2022 - 11:17am
When Professor Susan Michie’s appointment as the new Chair of the World Health Organisation’s “Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights” was announced on Monday, almost every news report mentioned that she is a longstanding member of the British Communist Party.
“Communist British scientist dubbed ‘Stalin’s nanny’ who wanted face masks and social distancing FOREVER is given top job at World Health Organization,” read the Daily Mail headline. “British professor who is member of the Communist party appointed as chair of WHO advisory group,” said the Telegraph. “WHO appoints Communist Party member who said face masks should continue ‘forever’ as chair of advisory board,” said GB News. And so on.
But is it fair to make a scientist’s private politics part of the story? Susan Michie certainly doesn’t think so, as she told me in her UnHerd interview last year when I asked her if she was a Communist:
But in this example, it becomes hard to separate politics from science. Later in the same interview, Professor Michie admitted that all of her colleagues on SPI-B, the UK government behavioural science committee, shared an ideological commitment to a more equal society: “we never talk about each other’s politics. I assume there’s a very broad range, but everybody’s unanimous about wanting a more equal society.”
She also explained that the new science of Public Health is collectivist by nature, seeking to provide group-wide solutions to health challenges, and so it fundamentally downplays individual rights. “What I don’t see a lot of amongst my colleagues maybe, but certainly the media, and especially the papers that you mentioned, would be much more emphasis on individual freedom, individual rights, rather than taking a sort of more collective population approach.”
It starts to feel distinctly like fundamental questions of how a society should be organised are being taken out of the political sphere — where they can be debated and ultimately rejected at the ballot box — and hard-wired into new scientific disciplines that are then treated as unquestionable expertise. Add to that the question of whether the WHO should be attempting to “nudge” populations rather than simply come out with technical advice, and no wonder people are getting paranoid.
Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.
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Subscribe“And I think that the kind of articles you referred to are a really disturbing kind of McCarthyite witch hunting, which I don’t think should have any place in a liberal tolerant society”.
She doesn’t want a “liberal tolerant society” – like all Communists this is simply a front for her real wish, which is to live in a Bolshevist one, an ideology which we should never tire of repeating, has killed tens, probably hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century, plus of course on a lesser but still inhuman scale, leading to economic stagnation, a complete lack of freedom, huge numbers of informers and spies etc. The fact that we give people who believe in this evil, such as Michie, positions of authority is quite extraordinary.
You got it in one!
Exactly. She’s a communist, so she’s a fascist. Let’s treat her accordingly.
Eh, fascist and communist are kinda polar opposites!
Simply not true.
Er, no. They’re really not.
But she is one of many neoMarxist in position of authority in uk.
BBC and universities are full of them.
You could not say “I am proud fascist”, never mind N**i and be employed by the state.
But I don’t remember anyone in Conservative party ever mentioning this publicly (maybe Norman Tebbit?)
I think old commie like Hobsbawm was member of Companion of Honour.
Who advised Queen to do it?
Did any other CH protest about it?
“You could not say “I am proud fascist”, never mind N**i and be employed by the state.”
That’s effectively what she is saying. To be a communist IS to be a fascist.
I tried to comment but forgot that typing N**i is not allowed by this forum algorithm but typing Communism is fine.
So it is awaiting moderation even after putting asterisk in.
Another example of double standard.
Just use the words ‘National Socialist’ instead
Or ‘Nartzee’.
“‘N**i Schmatzi,’ say Werner Von Braun!” Tom Lehrer 1965
Have you tried typing ‘National Socialist’?
Probably wanted to avoid the inevitable confusion with Corbynism.
The problem with Prof. Michie is that she is not a public health expert, she is not medically trained, and she is not and never has been a scientist. She is a psychologist and psychology in general (albeit not always) and the type of psychological research she has been involved with is wholly unscientific. People such a Michie distort the facts to always arrive at preconceived conclusions. As for her crying out that “masks should be forever”, I would simply say that this illustrates that she is incapable of actually looking at the real evidence, that is that upteem randomized controlled trials conducted since the 1920s to the present day have failed to show any benefit whatsoever of community masking in the context of respiratory virus infections. The truth of the matter is that in the community masks of all types fail to protect and fail to prevent transmission, and this is quite evident when one actually looks at the data for SARS-CoV2 by simply comparing neighboring regions with very similar demographics.
I would therefore conclude that the appointment of Michie to head the WHO nudge unit, a concept that is Orwellian to begin with, simply shows how corrupt and useless the WHO actually is.
Thanks for highlighting Michie’s professional background. I had assumed she had some actual health related expertise. If she is simply an communist psychologist that has latched on to Sunstein’s work to see a way to promulgate her ideological preferences she certainly should not be on any WHO committee. Indeed she should not have had any input into Sage with her repressive and ignorant views regarding face masks.
It would be good if we had a conservative PM who would drive out such ideologs from advisory committees and quangos. Perhaps McCarthy had a point, something I had not considered until now.
McCarthyism has always been described as mindless paranoia. Paranoia it was not! The communists really were out to destroy the West, a bit like the woke ideologues these days.
‘McCarthyism’ is an attempt to dismiss all criticism of Communism as mindless paranoia.
The main problem with McCarthy, the misbehaviour for which the Senate condemned him, was that he falsely accused innocent people of being Communists, and consequently weakened the battle against Communism. But Michie admits to being a Communist; it’s no false accusation and it’s wrong to label criticism of her as “McCarthyism”.
Also remember that another thing McCarthy was notorious for was villainizing and persecuting people who don’t agree with his ways of running the show. And interestingly, it’s now Michie’s cabal that’s doing this same dirty job, herself included. Remember how she shared around SAGE a smear letter denigrating Profs. Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson, and also openly smeared Lord Sumption for backing the Great Barrington Declaration?
Hit**r & Goebbels sure used this very tactic too back in the 30s. And so did Stalin during his reign. And so did Mao during the Cultural Revolution- and interestingly he has been praised by Michie, whom lamented the subsequent reforms made by his successor Deng which actually helped the Chinese people somewhat compared to Mao’s grave disaster. See where I’m going with this?
Ultimately it’s the tactics that matters when it comes to tyranny, doesn’t matter if it’s commie, fascist, n**i, theocracy, plutocracy or whatever benevolent-sounding tale those on the podium proclaim. And Michie shows all of the tactics that ought to be strongly denounced!
I haven’t seen any evidence that Michie supported masking because she thought it had any health benefits. It’s the psychological aspects of forcing people to suffer and obey that she is interested in. (Possibly for its own sake, possibly because she did think that vaccination was necessary and it was a way to get that.)
There actually is Laura, she said it during a cringy year-end interview of her and others like Null Ferguson & Devi Sridhar by the Guardian last Christmas. She claimed them to be highly effective- of which has already proven to be a huge lie by studies by that time. That said, she obviously had ulterior motives here!
Thanks. It seemed odd for an actual physical science expert to be a Communist. And not at all odd for a psychologist .
Psychology, I have concluded, is a sub-branch of religion and supernaturalstic. It presupposes a mind-body duality, which I think does not exist. In reality every ‘mental’ problem is actually a ‘physical’ one.
Communism is the secularised intensification of one strain of Christianity (in the west). Far eastern communism I think has other local religious and cultural origins mixed in.
Michie’s ‘social’ background is typical of her type. The inculabor of Communism in this country can be found in the immediately pre- and post-WW2 ‘Oxbridge’.
Communism is the secularisation and ‘scientification’ of something older than Christianity. I mean the project to ‘Make an End to Suffering’ first publically enunciated by Buddha.
And, aptly enough, Buddhism is often described as a psychology and its polemics often rely on the redefinition of language and of reality (see the Milinda Panha).
The problem with Prof. Michie is that she is a communist, so she’s a fascist, but we are failing to treat her as one.
To paraphrase Trotsky: You might not be that interested in Susan Michie’s politics, but Susan Michie’s politics are interested in you.
This woman’s name brings back horrible memories! Susan Michie isn’t a communist, she’s a damned stalinist. That is why, as an influential member of Sage (an oxymoron if ever there was one), she pushed for maximum lockdown. Not quite the gulag, but the next best thing.
I’ve always quipped that if there was no ’emergency’, the SAGE cabal’s income will SAG.
Michie brings me many traumatic flashbacks too(even though her terror dissipated somewhat since I moved to the UK), especially as a survivor of prolonged psychological abuse who has smelt something amiss since the beginning of this live COVID blockbuster. She is indeed a stalinist, though not saying this lightly- she also shows some very glaring sociopathic traits(as noted in the DSM-V written by fellow psychologists) and brandishes them with sadistic glee, and this is something that isn’t simply any average commie will exhibit. With dangerous people like her & Null Ferguson running around, it becomes hard to maintain the principle of free speech as someone who believes in it, because their words actually can wreak concrete havoc onto the population!
Having examined the PsyOps (covert manipulation) techniques used by Susan Michael and her colleagues, all I can say is that they don’t fool me or nudge me. They may fool other people but more fool them. I worked in management consulting when Nudge book came out and it became fashionable among certain consultants and then the civil service who set up a nudge unit. Nudge units appeared in various departments and even some local authorities. As you can imagine they practiced the worst kind of manipulation. I disliked it then and I dislike it now. I did not vote and pay taxes to be manipulated without my knowledge. Fortunately I can see through government propaganda. The issue of the ‘scientific basis’ for her work is a separate matter. I believe there are moral issues. Her collective good arguments do not, imho, override the need for transparency. During the Covid PsyOps (SPI-B) I took the time to read the minutes of SAGE meetings that were released. The hubris of these people had to be read to be believed. It smells rotten and like nothing I have encountered in normal private business consulting. (I have copied this comment to her email to be transparent)
Her interview by Freddie reveals her to be a self-righteous bigot so your views will simply be brushed aside as of no more importance than the death of a few thousand Kulaks in the march to the nirvana where she and her scientific comrades can nudge you and command you to obey – for your own good, of course. She is nothing but a pure and honest servant of the people in her eyes.
Surely few million Kulaks?
Unless you mean few thousand a day?
If ‘Covid Advice to the government’ was a normal business product, we’d be suing SAGE for multiple violations of whatever the ‘Truthfulness in Adverstising and Fraudulent Business Practices’ acts are called in the UK. This is a lower standard of truthfulness than you would like for government ministries, and SAGE did not measure up to that one. Looks like plenty of countries need to come up with some more legislation to protect us from future PsyOps.
But point of nudge units was to encourage compliance by great majority and that was achieved.
London overground trains between Shepherds Bush and Clapham were empty in March to May period in 2020.
Only when government announced “eat out to help out scheme” more covidiots came out.
Here is a word which I urge you to practise using:-
The.
That’s exactly why the nudge theory should never have been unleashed onto the public sector, and the pandora’s box that should’ve been left untouched!
I would be most interested to hear what Michie’s definition of “a more equal society” actually is. These things always sound harmless, bit never seem to be defined.
Equally, on what basis is “a more equal society” better than “a less equal one” ? Is there any factual or historical evidence to support this assertion ?
My own experience and study shows that “equality” is usually bought at the expense of liberty and a free society and this is not a trade-off many people (and certainly not most) wish to take. There is certainly very litle actual electoral support for Michie’s political beliefs (and never has been in this country). So quite why she thinks she has the right to push them on the country against the concensus of the people is beyond me. He claim that her politics do not affect her “scientific judgement” is a nonsense, since much of what she is seeking to “nudge” is not scientific.
She seeks a set of statistics with which she can weave a tale that eases her conscience.
Wait Richard- Wasn’t that exactly what Deborah Birx, Null Ferguson’s US counterpart, show to President Trump to extend the spring 2020 US lockdown- her own stats?
The concept of ‘equality’ ( 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2 etc.) belongs to mathematics and is entirely abstract. It cannot be discovered in the real world.
In the real world the only thing a thing can be identical with is itself.
I feel this to be most profound. (Thats not sarcasm either)
An excellent and fairly presented analysis from Freddie as usual. The WHO appointment is a further example of the ideological capture of organisations. The social justice ideological position held among Michie and her colleagues that greater social equality is desirable is not a scientific view but a political view and it is in fact essential that proper representation of voices in favour of the common desire for freedom of choice appears on such committees where mixed scientific and ideological advice is given.
As the contrast between the Swedish approach and the UK and continental approach to dealing with the pandemic shows a lack of a broad understanding of the need for individual choice over rigid one choice for all circumstances policies is essential. The sort of communist collectivist viewpoint represented by Michie does not provide this essential element for sound decisions to be taken. It is interesting that the tilt in favour of freedom came from a country that is commonly regarded as fairly collectivist and egalitarian in its general policy.
I suspect a lot of the rather absurd limitations on safe movement of people outside during the pandemic arose through egalitarian collectivist thinking that those who might be able to travel further safely should not be “privileged”.
No-one who declared themselves a fascist would be allowed a major role in such an organisation. Possibly quite rightly, given fascism’s track record of human misery. By any measure, communism’s track record is even worse, but somehow it’s still acceptable.
I’m not sure where you can draw the line. Exclude fascists, communists, people with strong religious convictions, atheists…
Peoples’ backgrounds will sometimes influence the work they do. Diversity in large organisations is surely the best way to limit extremism
But is there diversity on these WHO committees?
I am inclined to doubt it.
She admitted there was no diversity – they all think alike.
Indeed it was her justification as far as Sage was concerned. We think alike so we must be right.
With the exception of Mark Woolhouse, but he didn’t the balls to speak up until Omicron came along. And the thing is that by equality she didn’t mean “equal rights to live as who we are and make our own decisions, and live and let live”, she meant “equally mass-produced in an indoctrination factory, and any variation is abject”. The latter is perhaps the age-old ill that created countless historical man-made disasters, and much of the decadence that we see today!
You won’t find any of us who think it is morally wrong to nudge people in the Nudge Unit.
Well whoever disagrees with the likes of her would be cancelled and smeared, and won’t be counted as one of “the” aka public health experts. That’s why she tells you that there is no diversity or call for more personalized healthcare- Because it’s run by HER cabal! Just ask Profs. Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson for starters, and of course the 3 authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, and the list goes on!
The Bolsheviks got rid of the factory managers and replaced them with workers councils. Then they parachuted in the Party representative who had the power to overrule the workers council. What was dressed up as power to the people was really just replacing one hierarchy with another much less capable one – a power grab. So too with these ‘experts’ pretending to favour equality – in reality they are creating a surveillance public health dictatorship where “the science” is their Latin Bible that only they can read, and they are the infallible priesthood. Welcome to the new Dark Ages.
Communism, and communists, are pure evil.
This should not be a controversial statement, and only those already under the spell of it are likely to argue. We do not tolerate Nazis, so we should not tolerate communists. There is no nuance or debate required here.
Absolutely right.
If she was a member of a far-right political party, promoting an ideology that had caused the deaths of millions of people throughout the 20 century, then I am sure that it would be an issue of public debate, and enough to prevent her holding publicly funded positions.
Most sane people want a more equal society, but not one imposed top down which would be contradictory.
We want equality of opportunity not equality of outcome.
Equality of outcome usually translates to cutting down the tall poppies – tax the rich until they are as poor as the poorest – remove private health care in case I get an advantage through it.
To equalize outcomes you need the all powerful ‘elites’ to determine who gets what. The joke is on anyone who imagines that a world controlled by all powerful elites is anything approaching egalitarian. Kick the capitalists out of their mansions – and in moves the communist party members.
The only ‘equality of outcome’ available to humans is death.
Private health IS a tax. It means its users reduce the burden on the NHS, leaving more in theory for the rest of us taxpayers. But it’s voluntary. Taking even more tax from the rich is not. Same applies to private schools.
Banning private systems is unfair but but fairly regulating their profitability is the real nut we have to crack.
Why would you wish to “regulate their profitability” ? What does this mean ?
If they are businesses, tax them as nomal businesses. Some private schools may be trading as “charities” when they are in reality private businesses and perhaps that should be addressed. But you seem to implying that their are somehow “special” classes of businesses which should have more punitive tax treatment than others. I just don’t see this. In any case, UK tax law is already at least 10x more complex than it should be. Why make it worse ?
I didn’t mean to define different classes of business, but rather to highlight the tax-like nature of those examples when wealthier people not only pay the bulk of the nation’s tax bill but then do not take up some of the services funded by their tax contributions. Charitable status of private schools is subtly regulated by requiring the schools to provide free means-tested places which is the sort of regulation I mean.
However what worries me in the medical sector is that we are told that there is a shortage of surgeons etc, leading to months of delays to treatment to which we are all apparently entitled. And yet if we want to go privately, an NHS surgeon working privately in his spare time is available within days to carry out the op and to do that in some cases using hired NHS facilities. That is where some kind of regulation might encourage such medics to prioritise their NHS work a little more. Especially given the current circumstances…
My Italian friends say that you can only work in public or private medicine in Italy.
I am not sure it would help.
Most in demand consultants would go private, so NHS would loose their expertise including training of new doctors within NHS.
It is not in financial interest of consultants to eliminate or even reduce NHS queues.
I have pointed out before that in the UK private medicine is not chosen by disappointed and frustrated patients because it is better but because it is quicker. The existence of the NHS does not only damage the quality of its own output, but also that of alternative systems.
I had corporate private health insurance before retirement.
However, it only allows scheme members to jump NHS queue.
Unless you have some spare capacity in the system, it will always be so.
Clearly there would be much less demand for private medicine if NHS ever functioned properly.
When has there even been, and how could there ever be, an equal society? Every one is different, with different talents and skills, which have different worth at different times and in different places.
Inequality is the essence of life. I believed this when I was at the bottom of the heap, and I believe it now that I have lifted myself up by millimetre.
Communists don’t want “a liberal, tolerant society”, as they imprison those who disagree with them. Including their own. I suppose it’s better than killing, which they used to do.
Equality™: Where everyone is perfectly equal. Except me. I wield absolute power with zero accountability.
Imagine the outcry if this woman was a member of the BNP, let alone a National Socialist. Why should her being a hardline Communist be seen as any better?
Everything a communist does is informed by their disgusting, murderous politics.
The Nazi’s murdered fewer people than communism continues to do, and its outlawed in the UK. Why do we not outlaw communism?
As usual, it sounds like a lot of woke gibberish…’how do we make societies fairer and root out inequalities?’ First, tackle the enormous wealth transfer going on in plain sight then! Oh but actually, I’ll focus on the plebs and forcing them how to be, how to act through thinly veiled psy-ops. Michie sounds dangerous in her off-the-cuff remarks because it’s the subtext that is alarming: forcing us all to be equal through her skewed view of the world – enforcing mask mandates while having zero understanding of their ineffectiveness from a proper scientific perspective. Her politics is absolutely important, it’s essential because it shows her as a fundamentalist and more so now as she is going to be in a position of power in an organisation that is seeking unprecedented global power through the farcical yet deeply concerning Pandemic Treaty.
I heard a lot about improving equality and justice but I must have missed where she spoke about improving health.
The cynicism and preposterousness of the WHO’s new political directives of allegedly mitigating inequality is shown in the fact that no other policy has done more to exacerbate inequality than the WHO’s lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Shame on the WHO, shame on Michie.
What a worrying development.
My first question with these supra-national organisations is ‘who funds them?’ In this case you can find the top WHO Contributors here: https://www.who.int/about/funding/contributors
Look how much their power was increased by covid-19. Perhaps we should be given some options on defunding the WHO? It would certainly help with the current cost of living crisis.
Imagine the outcry if this woman was a member of the BNP, let alone a National Socialist. Why should her being a hardline Communist be seen as any better?
‘Public Health’ is not a science.
Science, by the way, is completely subservient to ideology in ‘dialectical materialism’.
Of course if the politics of the said public official were right of centre which is invariably described by leftists as “extreme right”, it would be terribly important!!
Of course if the politics of the said public official were right of centre which is invariably described by leftists as “extreme right”, it would be terribly important!!
Well said, Freddie.
In less credulous times the WHO’s attrocious record throughout the Wuhan ’flu fiasco would have led to a serious reassessment of its function if not the end of the organisation altogether and Sunstein and Thaler’s book would have been dismissed for what it is — another dangerous take on the work of BF Skinner
These ideologues are relentless. It is time to get pest control in.