Elements of propaganda in the Western world's political, public health, and media narratives of 2020-2022

In this chapter, we briefly review foundational contributions to the study of propaganda along with examples of the use of propaganda techniques in medicine in the past. We then 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 are drawn from Germany, Canada, and other countries in the Western World. They 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.