Conclusion

Focusing on the wrong things can cause more harm than good:

The price we have paid for such panics has been immense; most notably the colossal financial costs arising from the means society has chosen to defend itself from these threats. Yet, again and again, we have seen how it eventually emerged that the fear was largely or wholly misplaced. The threat of disaster came to be seen as having been no more than what we call a ‘scare’. [...] Either the scare originated in some genuine threat that had then become wildly exaggerated, or the danger was found never to have existed at all.


And usually, when the evidence emerges to show that this hysteria had been baseless, it attracts very much less notice than the scare itself had done when it was raging at its height. [Consider the scare in] America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, [which] centred on the belief that large numbers of children were being subjected to ritual or ‘satanic’ sexual abuse.

Source: Christopher Booker and Richard North. Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. [x]

But we are being mislead, either intentionally or unintentionally:

On one hand, there are the ‘pushers’: those whose interest is to promote the scare and to talk it up, such as scientists for whom it provides the promise of winning public attention or further funding. On the other there are the ‘blockers’: those whose interest is to downplay it, such as an industry it threatens to damage, or a government under pressure to be seen to be taking action. [...] Certainly the most dangerous moment in any scare comes when the pushers carry the day and the politicians and their officials unleash their regulatory response, since it is then that the real damage is caused.

Source: Christopher Booker and Richard North. Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. [x]