Obesity will kill more people even than the pandemic did and look what behaviour change was required for that.
The behavioural scientists wouldn’t have believed that people would adapt their behaviour to the extent that they did. So people will adapt their behaviour, but they need to believe that it matters sufficiently and the dangers are sufficiently great.
It is true that behavioural scientists didn’t think the British public would go along with lockdowns, but they were wrong for two reasons. Firstly, people were very concerned about catching a novel coronavirus, if not for themselves then because they didn’t want their elderly relatives to be infected. It is precisely because the virus was highly infectious that made one person catching it everybody else’s business. Catching SARS-CoV-2 was not a purely self-regarding act. This is what made it a genuine public health problem, unlike obesity which is a private health problem rebadged as a public health problem to trick people into thinking that government coercion is justified when it isn’t.
The second reason why people went along with lockdowns is that they did not have much choice. They were enforced by roaming police cars and CCTV cameras. There were roadblocks. Neighbourhood snitches peered out of their windows. Drones flew over the Peak District to “shame” ramblers. There was nothing voluntary about them, and it is safe to assume that the “behaviour change” Lansley has in mind to tackle obesity will not be voluntary either.
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