Covid misinformation & the consultant's shadow

Misinformation is difficult to define yet the biggest benefactors of it seem to be consultants who've formed a shadow government

Within the context of this Covid history Substack, I think it’s fair to say, Covid both exploded and focussed the government’s obsession with mis/disinformation (a term I use interchangeably through-out this post).

Reporting Covid mis/disinformation

The first step in misinformation is to establish what a pernicious problem it is.

In New Zealand the public was encouraged to report Covid related misinformation through an online form. From May 2021 the reports made through the form were sent to the Ministry of Health.

Reports ranged from a Stuff article that ‘undermined lockdowns’ to a concerned parent emailing a school on the impact of masking to what flyers had been seen that week from Voices for Freedom to an email attachment with protest information to an open letter published on the Covid Plan B website and so on. Social media teams also passed on reports.

This was reported - okay, but what actually was and is Covid misinformation? Some of what was labelled misinformation - I’ve shown through this stack was actually true. Some of it is just a difference of opinion.

How Covid misinformation was received by CERT NZ through a form, and communications teams like from DPMC, and sent to the Ministry of Health who referred it on.

The team who dealt with it at the Ministry of Health during 2021 and 2022, had no procedures or guidelines for what they were doing, yet they frequently referenced passing information on to other organisations - such as the Medical Council, the Department of Internal Affairs, Netsafe, Worksafe and the Police. With no procedures it’s not clear what the threshold, the definition of misinformation, for referral was.

How reports of misinformation were used

All this misinformation reporting was used to target the incredible marketing and advertising campaigns that underpinned the government’s Covid response - run by Clemenger BBDO.

The Ministry of Health and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) had been conducting vast amounts of research on attitudes to vaccination. The communications approach to mis/disinformation shows how, alongside that consumer research, misinformation reports would feed into and tweak the vaccination marketing and messaging.

This extended to supporting the media to combat misinformation too.

The Ministry of Health’s communications team met with Stuff, alongside Medsafe, in June 2021 to see how they could best support their Whole Truth Project. A $600k public interest journalism fund approved and funded project - which included covering Covid vaccines and misinformation. The Ministry of Health provided to Stuff narratives they were seeing.

Any questions on the vaccine were smoothed over in favor of anyone, anywhere, at any time - should, nay must, be vaccinated. A duty to be stoically borne, vaccination was the goal and no physical cost was too great to stop it.

Misinformation & its consultants

In government there’s a dirty trick - when you can’t be seen doing something, or you just don’t want to be blamed in case it doesn’t work out - you get other people to do it for you.

If you go do this by yourself - it’ll be called aiding and abetting when you get charged in court for it.

But in government - it’s called hiring consultants.

I think it’s fair to say consultants are an arm of government at this point - they’ve driven the health reforms within New Zealand. They’ve been labelled overseas a shadow government for decades.

After going through so many documents, I’ve consistently seen how Deloitte and PwC and KMPG ran or contributed to aspects of the government’s Covid response. They even went so far as to have formal roles within government.

Tamati Shepherd-Wipiiti is a partner at PwC, who was seconded directly into an equity-focussed senior management role at the Ministry of Health for the vaccination rollout.

Secondments are usually between government agencies, not private consultants to government so I found that title he was given super odd. He was the mastermind behind the Super Saturday vaxathon event, aimed at the 18 to 40 year age group, particularly Māori, to get vaccinated. Despite the media gushing there’s really not much evidence it was worthwhile (they were after all focused on vaccinating an age group with the least amount of risk).

This wasn’t unique to New Zealand - consultants ran the federal vaccination drive in the States. And ran it in France. And ran it in Australia.

Public servants are so named because they are supposed to act in the spirit of service to others. Consultants have no such values under-pinning them. They act in their own interest in order to invoice the next job.

So if misinformation comes knocking? Consultants are willing and ready.

The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) has commissioned several reports from international think-tank the Institute of Global Dialogue on extremism which talked about Covid misinformation. But the reports swept it up broadly, with no detail, bundling it into the descent into extremism everyone unwittingly falls into as soon as they install the Twitter app.

(Don’t get me started asking what constitutes extremism - a November 2021 Covid-19 Chief Executives meeting worried Covid disinformation would spur far-right ideologies and related extremism in New Zealand - examples of which were, such fearful threats, as “conservative ideals around family structure”.)

More reports from the Institute were commissioned, including specifically on Covid, but have so far been withheld in full. The reports that are available on the DIA website are polished, decisive, with an underlying whispered sense into your ear: we can help you.

Contrast those slick reports - with the most visible player in New Zealand in this space - the media hungry The Disinformation Project. Government agencies funded its original home at Auckland University called Te Pūnaha Matatini (TPM) for Covid modelling.

After being spun out of TPM to be independent, the lead academic in the Project, Kate Hannah seized the moment to respond to misinformation. The Project were contracted by DPMC in mid-2022 for $27,187.50 to do snapshots of trends related to Covid and mis/disinformation. Not exactly big consultant money yet but we all need to start somewhere.

DPMC noted in the contract, “The reporting needs to draw objective evidence-based conclusions, and provide insights from that evidence base.”

What ended up being produced was 2 fortnightly reports on the Covid mis/disinformation landscape. The reports are poorly formatted verbal diarrhea. They have that wordy yet vague language of academia that is usually only seen by a thesis advisor and few others. The reports are so impractical as to be useless:

Turns out DPMC agreed - as Kate Hannah appears to have noted DPMC’s feedback after turning in the 1st report:

The Project also delivered a 3rd report, Differential experiences of the pandemic, the infodemic and information disorders - disinformation impacts for Māori. Not sure what that means? Here’s a sample to help you:

Clear now?

Okay so, this reads like a proposal for a thesis - not a review that a government agency can create policy or briefings based on. It’s why a DPMC request for proposals for further work on disinformation insights would be unlikely to go to them.

But consultancy is based on sales, develop a rapport with the people you’ll invoice, you know. In that vein, Kate Hannah seems to be a new but natural consultant. She recently told the people who pay her invoices aka government, that public servants are simply better critical thinkers than the peasants out there in the vague, non-Wellington hinterlands:

So sure, they still have a way to go to be the New Zealand version of the Institute of Global Dialogue. But they’ve clearly got the gleam on the diamond right. Did the Project in their reports define Covid mis/disinformation clearly? Of course not.

Because the core of mis/disinformation is to talk around it, never to define it. The Project know better than anyone who owns reality - and it’s them. Not I. And not you. Them.

Former CIA analyst Mark Gurri has said, “To ask about disinformation is disinformation. And if you deny the power of disinformation, that’s disinformation to the 10th degree. It means that you’re a tool of Vladimir Putin.”

The threat of misinformation is that it undermines government pronouncements - the rightness or wrongness of which on either side - is utterly irrelevant.

You just need to know it’s there. And it’s growing.

Misinformation - a threat to national security

The rise of Covid misinformation neatly coincided with the Classification Office running a mis/disinformation national survey with Colmar Brunton (now Kantar) in 2021. To do this they consulted with the Disinformation Project when it was run out of TPM.

The final report was released by the Chief Censor publicly in June 2021. Even before the survey was run - the idea of a content regulator was cropping up in briefings to the Minister of Internal Affairs in 2020. Which said building an evidence base, such as the above, was important to then form policy decisions - such as looking into content regulation. A proposal for which was recently released by DIA. Kinda a self fulfilling loop, no?

This is the exact same game plan that was the outcome of a 2021 get together from the misinformation obsessed Aspen Institute in the States. Who in their final report….recommended regulation. And cited an online survey supporting their conclusion. Cue the batsh*t Disinformation Board that the Biden White House attempted to set up, but which rapidly fell apart under public scrutiny.

Meanwhile misinformation and specifically Covid, now crops up in DPMC’s 2022 National Security Long-term Insights Briefing.

This draft briefing relies on an Ipsos run survey - which found, “The second-highest threat of concern in the next 12 months was the spread of misinformation (misinformation here covers both mis- and dis-information)…”

The 2nd highest threat you say, well that comes…before everything but the 1st threat!

The more misinformation is talked up, the more these online surveys, from the exact same companies (and using the same pool of participants who sign up to do them) ask ‘is it a problem?’ and get back the desired, super-charged, no longer whispered: yes.

While I failed to define Covid misinformation - I think I’ve shown you how naughty you are to even wonder what it is. In fact, it’s downright dumb to even ask you dirty Putin supporter!

The next post will concentrate on how government agencies contorted themselves over Covid misinformation.

End of post bonus:

To look into this for Covid - I found I had to take a step back to work it out far wider - starting from the Christchurch Call - check out the full mis/disinformation landscape in New Zealand and it’s players. I did some fun graphics for you too in that page.