For critics of government policy, this framing made it easy to pick holes in aspects of the expert advice, and to focus criticisms on scientific advisers, rather than political decision makers. Other options were ruled out or, more precisely, never ruled in, because of imagined public opposition. Public statements at the time suggest that scientific advisers adapted to this imagined notion of a freedom-loving public, newly liberated by the Brexit referendum. Imagined public 2: the uniform and united publicAs the crisis worsened, existing inequalities were thrown into sharp relief. In these cases, we see two versions of an imagined public co-constructed by policy makers and scientific advisers, despite contradictory or non-existent evidence.
