Covidiots and Common Sense

During the first year of the pandemic, politicians made appeals to the ‘common sense’ of the British public, especially when the government’s loss of control over the pandemic became particularly conspicuous. Against the exemplars of ‘common sense’ were set ‘covidiots’: those whose actions were taken as displays of exemplary stupidity and ignorance.

In this episode we hear from Dr Fred Cooper, Dr Arthur Rose and Professor Luna Dolezal who discuss the appeal to ‘common sense’ as a rhetoric of public health, which shifted responsibility away from political failures and towards ‘covidiots’, people whose failure to use common sense cast them as enablers of the pandemic. 

For more on the use of ‘common sense’ as a public health strategy in the UK during Covid-19, see the Blog post Shame, ‘Common Sense’, and COVID-19: Notes from Mass Observation by Fred Cooper and the chapter Good Solid British Common Sense: Shame and Surveillance in Everyday Life by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK.

To learn more about the hashtag #covidiots and other incidents of pandemic shaming see the chapter Covidiots!: The Language of Pandemic Shaming by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK.

To learn more about Covid neologisms see Amanda Roig-Marin’s article English-based coroneologisms: A short survey of our Covid-19-related vocabulary and BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth episode The Language of the Pandemic.

Thank you to Alice Waterson. Further thanks to Jennifer Allan, Ray Earwicker, João Florêncio, Tanisha Spratt and Nikita Simpson for contributing to the series. 

This podcast series is based on the research findings in the book Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose.

This podcast series was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant number AH/V013483/1.

Further support has come from the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) at the University of Exeter, the Shame and Medicine project, the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project and the Wellcome Trust grant number 217879/Z/19/Z.

Hosted by Paul McNally & produced by Develop Audio.

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