23 November 2023 , 16:25
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Some ethnic minority communities thought the Covid-19 vaccine push was part of a "secret conspiracy" aimed at "culling the population", the Covid Inquiry was told.
Kemi Badenoch said there was a fear in some ethnic minority communities that the Government was secretly trying to harm people by encouraging them to have the jab.
The former Minister for Equalities said: "There was a fear that a lot of the communications about disproportionate impact was actually a secret conspiracy to scare ethnic minorities into taking vaccines which was a way of the Government culling the population. So even the things that we were doing in order to identify risk were being manipulated into conspiracy theories to deter people from doing what would help them mitigate that risk and that was something I was particularly concerned about."
Ms Badenoch, who is now Business Secretary, admitted the Government is yet to get "a handle" on dealing with misinformation. She said she is regularly confronted in the street by people who claim that she is part of a "grand conspiracy" to infect them with the virus.
"I say this, even as a constituency MP, the number of people who come up to me in the street and tell me that I am part of a grand conspiracy to infect them, and 'so-and-so died' because of the material that we were putting out," she added.
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"I don't think Government has got a handle on dealing with misinformation. I don't think that we have adapted to this age of social media where information travels at lightning speed across the world. I don't know how we solved it, but in terms of gaps, I think there is a lesson in the pandemic that this is an area that needs some addressing. Ms Badenoch said she has heard there is a lot of work going on in departments on the issue, but added: "I don't see it."
During the pandemic, ministers were criticised for vaccine uptake disparities. Data in 2021 showed white people were almost twice as likely to have been vaccinated than Black people among over-80s in England.
In February 2021, Halima Begum, who was then-chief executive of race equality think tank, the Runnymede Trust, said: “We need to balance the conversation away from hesitancy and uptake to the response to BAME groups and their institutional mistrust now, and how they might be supported to show trust back in our public services like the NHS and the police.”
A month later, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport launched a new social media campaign to tackle false vaccine information shared amongst ethnic minority communities. It followed concerns from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) of low vaccine uptake amongst ethnic minority communities and an Ofcom study which showed that people from a minority ethnic background were twice as likely as white respondents to rely more on people they know, people in their local area or people on social media for information about coronavirus.