When Boris Johnson announced the government’s plan to deliver 10 million tests a day - Operation Moonshot - on the 9th of September 2020, he claimed it was to return life to normal. But it was also clearly an effort at saving face and reputation management.

In this episode, we hear from Dr Arthur Rose and Professor Luna Dolezal on the problems of using expansive rhetoric to deflect reputation damage. As an alternative to these and the other shame-intensive practices of the series, the team proposes a Shame-Sensitive Public Health that might address the more corrosive effects of shame in the pandemic.

To read more about Operation Moonshot and the UK government’s efforts to save face during 2020 see the chapter Operation Moonshot: Notes on Saving Face by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK. Also see Gemma Milne’s The Guardian opinion piece This 'moonshot' hype only illustrates No 10's obsession with tech hyperbole.

To hear more about attempts at ‘face saving’ and the UK’s testing programmes see the BMJ Blog post ‘Saving Face’ and Public Health Policy during Covid-19 by Arthur Rose and Luna Dolezal.

For more about the idea of shame-sensitivity and principles for shame-sensitive practice, see the article Beyond a Trauma-Informed Approach and Towards Shame-Sensitive Practice by Luna Dolezal and Matthew Gibson. To see these ideas applied to public health contexts, see the policy document Shame-Sensitive Public Health and Covid-19 by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose, on the WHO’s Behavioural and Cultural Insights into Health Policy Hub.

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 and produced by Develop Audio.

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