Half the experts in Covid-19 campaign received threats
Around half of the scientists and experts brought in to manage the Japanese government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic were the target of threats, criticisms or accusations from the public, with at least two physically menaced, according to a scientific paper.
The study examined public reactions to experts who appeared in the media between February 2020 and March 2021 and found that scientists had received death threats or threats of physical or sexual violence.
The research was carried out by a team led by Mikihito Tanaka, a professor at Waseda University, and paralleled similar studies in other countries. It found that 80 per cent of the experts who were the target of attacks felt psychological and emotional impacts.
Dr Shigeru Omi, a former regional director of the World Health Organization and chairman of the government’s advisory panel on the pandemic, had the outside of his office damaged in an attack with a shovel.
Professor Hiroshi Nishimura, an epidemiologist at Kyoto University, received a letter in the post containing a box-cutter blade and had his car tyres slashed.
Other attacks came in “toomany-to-count” phone calls, letters and email messages, Tanaka told the Post. “The period we studied was before vaccines were being produced, so there were fewer claims about the dangers of vaccines, but it is clear that day by day, the ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement got stronger,” he said.
“Many of the messages also talked about J-Anon [the Japanese branch of the Q-Anon conspiracist movement in the US] and shared just crazy ideas. And they were not only talking about medical things, but about how earthquakes in Japan were manmade and being caused by a US ‘earthquake weapon’.”
Others insisted on referring to the illness as the “Wuhan virus”, after the laboratory in the Chinese city some say was the source of the outbreak. There have also been claims it was a man-made virus that was being weaponised, and that it was released on purpose.
“Nationalists tended to claim in their messages that China was responsible for the virus spreading and that it was made by the Chinese,” Tanaka said.
Yoko Tsukamoto, a professor of infection control at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido, appeared several times on television, offering advice on how people should protect themselves. She quickly became the target of criticism. “They would send me messages on email or call the university, and some even got my mobile phone number. They would get angry and emotional, and nearly always it was about how unsafe and dangerous vaccines are,” she said.
Related studies were conducted in seven other jurisdictions, including the United States, Britain and Taiwan, and found that 15 per cent of specialists whose comments appeared in the media had received death threats, while 22 per cent reported threats of physical or sexual violence.
Arguably the most high-profile coronavirus expert in the world was Dr Anthony Fauci, top adviser to the administration of then US president Donald Trump. In August 2022, Thomas Connally was sentenced to 37 months in jail for making threats to harm Fauci.
Kazuhiro Tateda, a former president of the Japanese Association for Infectious Diseases and member of the panel that advised the government on the crisis, said: “We have to remember it was a time of terrible confusion and fear in Japan and all around the world.
“I think Japanese people are generally quite patient and accepting of situations … but as we see, they do respond.”
Tanaka said it was important that lessons were learned from the public’s response to the pandemic, and discussions were critical to a healthy society. At the same time, it was vital to ensure the safety of experts charged with protecting the nation’s health.