The recent vote against boosters by the expert CDC committee and the resulting overturn by the head of the CDC highlights the need for broader free and uncensored discussion.

I read a lot of studies and get help parsing them from YouTube occasionally. Watching videos of more competent people poking holes in videos of quacks talking about the same studies is quite useful and persuasive.

Content like what you're describing is expensive to make, usually very boring and gets no views. You have to pay experts, read studies, interview government officials, maybe even read some science papers. Later you have to dumb it down enough so the common man can understand it. Content like this makes me want to defer the matter immediately to actual experts so I can stop thinking about it.

Now contrast this to viral content claiming that Bill Gates is conspiring to implant 5G chips, vaccine induced magnetism, government hiding thousands of deaths from COVID vaccines and all other conspiracy theories that are easy to manufacture from the comfort of your home, require no expert opinion and get tons of views. Content like this is super addictive, exploits my fears, sows doubt and leaves me less informed. This content wins is the economy like this.

I had a reply about attention algos promoting content higher than it deserves being the root problem. In the old days content with more credible links to it made it to the top for all regardless of your preconceived notions. Now everything is gamed out to your existing profile with God like precision.

They aren't credible, but for other reasons. Remember when covid wasn't airborne and thus masks didn't do anything unless worn by professionals? And border closures wouldn't be necessary and only xenophobes would call for them? And then how they banned corona tests by anyone but the CDC? And the approval delays?

They're playing politics, worry about second-order effects before first-order ones and do 180° turns instead of focusing on the core mission of assessing whether something is a) safe b) likely effective. The same situation happened again with the booster approvals, they dragged their feet again and decided that only those above 65 should be allowed to get them when in practice some international travelers already are forced to get more than two shots due to inconsistent regulations.

More nuanced policy, communicating uncertainty and "currently not recommended but allowed" middle grounds would help their credibility.