The graph above and excerpt to follow are from pp. 27-28 of the lawsuit brought by America's Frontline Doctors against Xavier Becerra, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services et al.

The idea of using fear to manipulate the public is not new, and is a strategy frequently deployed in public health. In June 2020, three American public health professionals, concerned about the psychological effects of the continued use of fear-based appeals to the public in order to motivate compliance with extreme COVID-19 countermeasures, authored a piece for the journal Health Education and Behavior calling for an end to the fear-mongering. In doing so, they acknowledged that fear has become an accepted public health strategy, and that it is being deployed aggressively in the United States in response to COVID-19:

“… behavior change can result by increasing people’s perceived severity and perceived susceptibility of a health issue through heightened risk appraisal coupled by raising their self-efficacy and response-efficacy about a behavioral solution. In this model, fear is used as the trigger to increase perceived susceptibility and severity.”

In 1956, Dr. Alfred Biderman, a research social psychologist employed by the U.S. Air Force, published his study on techniques employed by communist captors to induce individual compliance from Air Force prisoners of war during the Korean War. The study was at the time and to some extent remains the core source for capture resistance training for the armed forces.

The chart below [see above] compares the techniques used by North Korean communists with the fear-based messaging and COVID-19 countermeasures to which the American population has been subjected over the last year.