And they haven't stopped agitating. And probably won't stop.

Which makes me wonder: with the degree of weaponization of the internet on the side of the anti-vaxxers will the next pandemic be 'the big one'? Enough people that refuse vaccination and you are looking at an entirely different probable outcome.

Here in NL a small army of foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorists did their utmost to undermine the vaccination campaign with the most outrageous claims and I'm pretty sure that we can chalk up a number of unnecessary deaths to their efforts. They wouldn't be able to tell a virus from a bacterium but that didn't stop them from spouting one nonsense theory after another and organizing (sometimes violent) protests against health care workers and their equipment.

This is a worrisome development.

We have not learned anything from COVID about constructive, collective, cooperative action in furtherance of mitigating a health disaster. The next pandemic, if it’s more deadly or hits more uniformly across the population, will be the same or worse clusterfuck. The same officials will take the same ineffective non-actions. The same idiots will downplay it as bodies pile up. The same fReEdOm FiGhTeRs will complain and protest about perceived authoritarianism. The same uncoordinated country-by-country, state-by-state approach will be tried and the same people will wonder why it fails. It’s going to be a totally predictable farce.

I fear you are right.

The interesting thing to me is not what happened during COVID-19, but during the previous pandemic, the one that wasn't and that was nipped in the bud due to some very fortuitous circumstances and the speedy action of authorities and health care officials in many countries collaborating with unprecedented efficiency:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS

COVID-19 had some parameters slightly different, for instance the incubation time was a bit longer allowing it to spread undetected.

There is no reason to make any assumptions about the various parameters of the next pandemic but they could very well be worse than COVID-19 and the way we've dealt with this one makes me quite skeptical about our ability to come through this sort of thing unscathed, especially not if every Tom, Dick & Harry are going to run interference.

We got lucky, twice.

Well, most of the measures in most of the European countries were ruled as unconstitutional: locked into our houses not being allowed to get out, curfews afterwards at night and so on (and of course all these rules were set in place by politicians that never respected any of them - and worse, a lot of them made money by importing and selling back to the state masks and other PPE equipment). Most of the people, even if they took the vaccines, but dared to say anything about forcing people to get them or commenting on the absurdity of police patrolling parks and stopping any groups of more than 3 people, forcing masks outside in cold weather (not even bothering to read the instructions on the box) were all labelled antivaxxers, corona deniers and right wing nazis. So a lot of people decided to shut up and let the new religion of “I believe in science” do their thing. But next time when a serious pandemic hits, the trust has already been eroded.

“Unconstitutional” in which countries and by what constitution?

I learned that a lot of people think contrarianism makes them smart, and that even if everything everyone said was true, they felt it necessary to ‘resist’ purely for the sake of it.

I never though that in a pandemic, so many people in so many places would both politicise public health measures and actively side with the virus. But here we are.

Trust has indeed been lost, but it might not be where you think.

Indeed, all we had to do was stay put for a bit and yet the virus found humanity actively fighting for its side. Baffling. To put it mildly. And it appears that they are still litigating this. Even more baffling.

What are you talking about? A bit? Most of Europe was in a strict lockdown in spring 2020, you weren’t even allowed to leave your home. The lockdowns and curfews continued also in 2021, how much longer should that bit be?

In Bavaria, Germany the first strict lockdown was considered unlawful and extreme compared to the results and the severity of the situation, in the same time it was found that it violated people’s fundamental rights.

Resist what? What contrarianism? Do you think I want to go and kill people to prove I am smart? Or what is your point? Do you think it was fair to lock people in their houses, was it fair not to allow people to go outside and have a walk in the park? Was it normal that the police was out on the streets hunting for people or groups of people?

When my mom got cancer again after 2 years of not being able to get any kind of screening (yeah, that’s not possible, I’m just here spreading misinformation, no one died because cancer was mostly ingnored) and we drove back home (in the EU) having 3 negative pcr tests 3 days in a row, we were sent by the police in home isolation and checked by them every day, like some sort of criminals. But I sided with the virus and still went to see her in her last days, being there when she had her last breath. So you can take your politics, your health measures and let me live my life with the little humanity we were still allowed to have.

It’s easy to act all superior online with your cushy it jobs, belief in science, having food and packages delivered by those pesky Covid deniers while lecturing others online.

> most of the measures in most of the European countries were ruled as unconstitutional

> In Bavaria, Germany the first strict lockdown was considered unlawful and extreme compared to the results and the severity of the situation

These are somewhat different, no? A bit of a different scope from the original claim. One region in Germany made a ruling, not sure that means most European countries ruled most measures unconstitutional.

> Resist what? What contrarianism?

Resist public health measures, refuse to close their non-essential businesses, refuse to wear masks, spread nonsense about the vaccines containing microchips so Bill Gates can track you, hold rallies where the message was "covid is a hoax", that sort of thing. You know, the stuff we've had endless news stories about in all sorts of countries.

> Do you think I want to go and kill people to prove I am smart?

You? I have no idea, but clearly there were a lot of people for whom their own self-satisfaction, self aggrandisement, notoriety and even just profit-making was indeed more important than public health. From the short-sighted "masks only stop ill people spreading the diseas and I'm not ill!" to the full on "vaccines kill unborn babies! Buy my supplements!" hucksters.

> Do you think it was fair to lock people in their houses, was it fair not to allow people to go outside and have a walk in the park? Was it normal that the police was out on the streets hunting for people or groups of people?

Of course it wasn't normal. There was a global pandemic in progress. That's the point, these were extraordinary measures because of an unusual threat. Maybe some (perhaps like in Bavaria) were over the top, but in general the idea was to stop the spread of a deadly disease that's now killed about 7 million. I think the question of whether it was 'fair' to keep people inside is more or less irrelevant. Was it justified, is more interesting.

> yeah, that’s not possible, I’m just here spreading misinformation, no one died because cancer was mostly ingnored

Lots of people died and will still die because cancer screenings were delayed. In many places this was simply because the healthcare systems were completely overwhelmed with the numbers of covid patients they had to deal with on top of their normal caseloads. I'm really not sure of your point here - are you saying that your mother wouldn't have died , or wouldn't have been waiting so long for diagnosis if there were no anti-covid measures? Because to me it seems that without the anti-covid measures then European healthcare systems would have been even more screwed for longer than they already were, as even higher covid caseloads dominated.

Unfortunately this is a known consequence in the UK as well, many routine tests and operations postponed as the NHS struggled to keep up.

I'm sorry your mother passed away, that must have been a painful thing to go through, especially with the state of the world at that time. FWIW I would likely have disregarded rules that tried to stop me being with my mother at such a time as well.

In Spain the lockdown was deemed unconstitutional by the Tribunal Constitucional, our equivalent of the Supreme Court.

Interesting, thanks.

In the UK there barely is a constitution, and as much as it does exist, it really only governs how the different parts of the government interact with each other, and how they operate. As such 'unconstitutional' isn't really a thing there, which is one of the reasons I asked.

There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well. The knock on effects from the absolute bad faith mess from discourse around vaccines is going to fuck up so much in public health for decades.

I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths. But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.

> There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well.

Yes, the anti-vaxx (and anti-government) sentiment has received an enormous boost from this, time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question.

> I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths.

I'm partially ok with that. They really should give out a double helping of advice: one that is dumbed down for those that lack the necessary background, one that is more on the level for those interested or that do have the necessary background. As it is the dumbed down version is all we've got and the result is that it is too easy to poke holes in it.

At the same time, some of the under-preparedness would have been much harder to deal with without the occasional white lie, it stopped a lot of profiteering and kept some items in supply when otherwise there would have been a run on them.

> But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.

Yes, and fwiw I think those people should have gone to jail. We're working on a couple of those cases here NL at the moment and I'm really curious what the outcome will be.

> time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question.

We're about to find out, buddy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/how-polio-silently-spread-in...

Ugh. Ok. Let's hope they manage to contain it and that the anti-vaxx crowd will realize in time what kind of risks they are playing with.

The white lie didn't stop profiteering, it was transparent for anyone watching with their eyes open and only made hoarding worse.

Telling the truth would have resulted in far less supply shocks, instead, half the population willfully ignored the obvious lie by putting their heads in the sand and the other half ratcheted up their preparedness (because the govt clearly lying about everything at this point)

I worry, but also remember that much of the pandemic was just a replay of the Spanish Flu. Distrust in masking, distrust in vaccines, a complaint about the "media" keeping "the truth" from the public.

> This is a worrisome development.

Governments are working with private corporations to promote misinformation and silence real information and you’re worried about…anti vaxxers?

I can maybe steel man a utilitarian stance for this position though I’m afraid it’s weak to “surely the lepers won’t eat my face”.

> promote misinformation and silence real information

"misinformation" and "real information" as rationally believed at the time or only with 20/20 hindsight? It's an important distinction. Also, what about the recommendations that did stand the test of time, or the misinformation about vaccine risks and alternative treatments that was rightly suppressed because it was false and harmful? If this is to be anything but an exercise in anti-authoritarian self-congratulation, people need to own up to their own mistakes as well.

Oops, we suppressed correct info, but it's not our fault, we didn't know it was correct!

A very eye opening realization I had after 2020 is that the vast majority of people have absolutely zero critical thinking skills, and that applies specially to snobby intellectual circles like academia or this very forum. They are the most indoctrinated people on Earth and it's like talking to a wall.

Which “real information” was silenced? I sure hope you’re not referring to that farce of an article from ZeroHedge about “weaponized lab-grown covid.” What misinformation was promoted? Are you still on about the first week or 2 when they said masking was ineffective?

Here is some promotion of misinformation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqaN68vBvXQ&t=3

Exactly.

Want to reduce the impact of anti-vax messaging? The government could stop lying and trying to suppress truthful information to start with.

This narrative is analogous to having dropped your ice cream cone on the ground, and being upset at the tyranny of your parents preventing you from continuing to eat it.

Every centralized service will inevitably be goaded into censorship for assorted reasons. Every filter has false positives. Grifters, charlatans, and informational warfare campaigns pumped pure horse shit into our memetic stream (through our own institutions even), driving the signal well below the noise floor. Twitter attempted to filter out the hostile noise to remain useful, necessarily throwing a lot of worthwhile information out in the process.

I've never been a fan of "web 2.0" centralization, and generally believe in free communications via libre software. But spinning this most recent tempest-in-a-teapot as some watershed scandal is ridiculous. Especially in the larger context of Twitter just being bought out by an impotent strongman, who has been marketing it with a brand of "free speech" while censoring per his personal whims.

If these events are really what it took for you to start paying attention to the power centralized companies wield, then congratulations I guess? But litigating what Twitter Past did as exceptional, as if censorship isn't intrinsic to the technical foundation of the whole service, just seems like a denial mechanism that will circle you back to your previous unaware state.

I think in a weird way COVID 19 fell into a strange area of lethality. For those looking at population data, it was horrific, but on a personal level the worst outcomes were rare enough that many people could avoid encountering any deaths or even severe illness in their inner circles.

This made it rather easy to be an antivaxer, since people could just put their heads in the sand and remain blissfully ignorant of the scope of the disease. The deaths were just statistics, as were the benefits of vaccination.

I think in a more severe pandemic, where more people would be losing friends or loved ones, they wouldn't have the luxury of this ignorance and they would be lining up to get a vaccine.

Yes, that's very true. But that is also a super dangerous conclusion, that means that effectively until the dead are quite literally piling up in the streets that people will be happy to pretend it isn't real. This ability to deny something as long as it doesn't affect you personally is likely a very handy trait at some times but during pandemics it is going to lead to major trouble.

Or people were managing their own risks. I got vaxxed and followed mandates while they were in place, but as soon as my area relaxed things, I went back to life as normal, as did a majority of people. But I knew and interacted with people who didn’t mask and didn’t get vaccinated, and while I disagree with their risk assessment, I didn’t treat them as outcasts or murderers, nor did I advocate for them to be banned from the public sphere. Fortunately, I live somewhere that is more balanced in their approach, and just had mandates and lockdown to curb earlier waves prior to the vaccines. Which suits my risk assessment and most people where I live. The ones who complain tend to be rather politically motivated to the left, but most of them stopped following recommendations after a while.

I think back to the big controversies over athletes like Kyrie Irving and Novak Djokovic, and I never understood how they were a risk warranting that kind of response. That’s where the anti-anti-vaxxers look authoritarian.

Many young and healthy people still don‘t know anyone personally who died due to covid, nor anyone claiming to have long covid.

Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.

> Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.

In the US alone you're talking about 75K people dead under 50.

And over 50 the numbers rise rapidly.

Can't really do much with absolute numbers, they must be per capita and compared to other ailments

The absolute numbers are actually a pretty good rebuttal to a comment that says "never".

If you want to talk about it as a rate that's fine, but the pre-vaccine risk of dying from covid for a healthy person in their 40s or 50s was probably comparable to their lifetime risk of dying in a vehicular collision, it's not a small thing.

This is just my story, but I had a situation where a close friend's mother died from COVID. Someone else from the social circle, who knew that person well but was antivax, their first response to hearing them pass from COVID was, "but she had diabetes right? And wasn't she overweight? So it wasn't just COVID?".

So it didn't matter if people lost friends or loved ones, the political war has casualties in their minds.

> I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries

I didn't have to wait at all. There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room.

The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not. There is no such thing as zero risk in medicine. When you claim something false like that and people start to notice events that contradict your words, they will no longer trust you.

This is why the cost benefit analysis must be detailed and presented clearly to people. They should make the choice of their own accord. Trying to impose it on them is how you get "anti-vaxxers" who no longer trust anything you say. I don't blame them.

This is not even a modern phenomenon. Over a century ago there was a revolt in my country over forced vaccination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt

> To eradicate smallpox, Dr. Cruz convinced the Congress to approve the Mandatory Vaccination Law on October 31, 1904, authorizing sanitary brigade workers, accompanied by police, to enter homes and apply the vaccine by force.

> The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not.

This is very dishonest. Nobody is unaware that the vaccines are not perfectly safe — there’s a ton of scientific study trying to determine the exact bounds – but what’s been clear from the data and in most of the public health advice is that they’re far less dangerous than getting COVID.

> Nobody is unaware that the vaccines are not perfectly safe

Are you so sure? "Safe and effective" and similar slogans in other languages were repeated like almost like a mantra, especially in lower-income, immigrant areas of less-fluent English proficiency. And it took me personally meeting someone who developed Guillain-Barre syndrome after COVID vaccination to even begin to question the narrative.

I get that the HN viewership tends to be well-educated and English fluent but there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to parse the results of a clinical trial or waiver form.

At least in the city I live in, extensive outreach efforts were made to educate people. Now, you can always find people who are misinformed but I would worry more about billion dollar media empires pushing unfounded fears of vaccination than innocent misunderstanding.

> far less dangerous than getting COVID

Since the risk of COVID varies wildly by demographics, this leaves open the possibility that the vaccines are a poor risk/reward tradeoff for large numbers of the people it's being recommended to (essentially, everyone over 6 months old). And since they don't prevent COVID infection, "risk of vaccination" vs "risk of a COVID infection" is the wrong comparison to make in the first place.

They do prevent infection - not as effectively against the later variants but still notably - and the side effects which the right-wing media is stoking are indeed more common and more severe from an unvaccinated case of COVID than getting vaccinated:

https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36419861/

It's so odd that Israel found no significant increased risk of myocarditis from SARS-CoV-2 infection in a very large study conducted before vaccines were in widespread use: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/

> they’re far less dangerous than getting COVID

Of course but that's not what authorities and all kinds of pro-vaccination people were saying at the time. General statements about safety don't inspire confidence. There's a possibility that the vaccines are beneficial for some groups but not others, for example.

Even today in my country they do everything possible to coerce people into vaccination. They come just short of abolishing personal freedom and consent. This is not how things are supposed to be done. People should want to take vaccines because there's data that shows benefit. Losing their trust means they won't even trust the data.

> Of course but that's not what authorities and all kinds of pro-vaccination people were saying at the time.

It most certainly was in the United States, starting with the initial vaccine availability notices and the information sheet you were given at the time.

> There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room.

Thromboembolic events are a common side effect of COVID-19, and vaccine roll out often led to infection surges as the sense of normality returned before full immunity.

Those events also happened in patients reporting full isolation.

They're also caused by Covid infection. Which makes sense, if the spike proteins produced by the vaccine cause these issues, then so do the spike proteins produced by the virus.

That logic is most likely simple, elegant and wrong.

Welp, I'm open to clarification.

Given both the vaccine and the virus can cause myocarditis or pericarditis, and given that the only thing they have in common is the spike protein, I'm curious as to where you think I went wrong.

Where you went wrong is getting it backwards. The vaccines are orders of magnitude less likely to cause cardiac problems than the virus itself, for fairly obvious medical reasons.

And that cardiac events in both cases are a minor part of the greater effects and dangers of catching the disease.

So it's about not focusing on the wrong things

> The vaccines are orders of magnitude less likely to cause cardiac problems than the virus itself, for fairly obvious medical reasons.

Do you have a citation or evidence for that statement? Estimates for cardiac vaccine injury are in the 4-5% range. Your statement would imply that 40% of people infected with Covid would have cardiac issues. The evidence in low vaccine rate countries (or Africa) contradict your statement (no where near 40% of the population is getting cardiac issues).

The vaccine induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia caused by the adenovirus vaccines turns out to be due to PF4 binding to the adenovirus capsid and has exactly nothing to do with the spike protein, even though that is the only common factor between the vaccines and the virus. But it turns out that the clotting problems are totally separate.

So that is a failure of the same kind of logic that you're trying to employ. You have a virus with a clotting issue and a vaccine with a clotting issue, and they both only share the spike protein, and we know for certain now that isn't the mechanism.

A quick search finds literally dozens of articles in medical journals like these:

Thrombotic complications are frequent in COVID-19 and contribute significantly to mortality and morbidity

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32857878/

One of the special characteristics of this disease is that it may predispose patients to thrombotic disease both in the venous and arterial circulation.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33719953/

Which doesn't tie the problem to the spike protein or relate it to the vaccines.

Oh, it wasn't clear that that is what you meant. Thanks for elaborating in a sibling comment.

How are you supposed to communicate 1 in 10^7 chance of anything happening versus communicating it's risk-free. The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference. College-educated members of society sure, but what about the rest? Health messaging has to be broadly applicable. Most people won't have an issue, so it's simplest to convey this idea.

> 1 in 10^7 chance

I'm not sure I believe that.

> The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference.

The public may be uneducated but they're still equipped with brains capable of pattern recognition.

In my country, the public saw young famous people "mysteriously" dying of heart attacks and strokes immediately after getting vaccinated, in some cases not long after tweeting some insults at skeptics. People are watching and they are going to connect dots.

I have a little collection of screenshots of people who suffered such a fate... It's unfortunate really.

You’re suffering from confirmation bias just as much as /r/HermanCainAward. There are 8 billion people in the world, there will be plenty of examples of any theory you can come up with.

In my country the vaccination was by prescription. People who wanted to be vaccinated would sit down for 3 minutes with a doctor who would tell them their probability of complications if they got Covid vs adverse events if they got the vaccine, given their sex and age bracket. (Well, not much was known for the first shot, but by the second shot side effects were well known.) Then if they consented they would be administered the vaccine. 80% of the population consented. This is how you do responsible public health communication.

As an aside, naming phenomena after priests / politicians like that can't possibly be productive. It's telling the outgroup (people who admire Cain) that they are worthy of contempt instead of addressing their object level concerns and misunderstandings.

Sorry, are you suggesting that people without a college education are too ignorant to make judgements about their own health and that it's therefore ok to lie to them?

This sort of high handed paternalism is exactly the attitude that has destroyed faith in institutions.

That's exactly what they are suggesting, unfortunately. I was about to reply to another comment but I think it was deleted. I think what I wrote is important enough to post here anyways.

> It's obvious the messaging landed on was chosen was to maximize the individual choice to vaccinate as that was reasoned to the best possible outcome for all.

This is inducing people to pick the choice you consider correct. This is unethical in the medical profession. Ethical conduct is to present the facts and let the patient decide. You don't "maximize" any outcome, nor do you "reason" about anything on behalf of the patient. To do so means you are prioritizing concerns other than your patient's best interests and once they figure this out you are done.

If necessary, you can and must use simpler language to help them understand complex concepts. What you cannot do is decide for them in advance and then misrepresent facts in order to manufacture consent for the intervention you favor.

If people are as indeed as smart as you and your parent commenter say they are, then they will understand there doesn't exist any risk-free medical procedure. Having to remind of them of that fact is the kind of patronizing you both seem to be rallying against, after all. The argument could evolve further to say, the messaging doesn't matter at all, since everyone is smart enough to make their own choice, so why be upset about it? Or, stated in other words, when exactly where they lied to if you claim they're smart enough to dissect the nuance? I guess the ultimate terminus of this discussion is the interpretation of what it means to characterize the vaccine as safe.

> Having to remind of them of that fact is the kind of patronizing you both seem to be rallying against, after all.

Not really. You'd be surprised how many people believe that. They need to make informed choices. The way to do that is to say "the benefits are X and the risks are Y". If they have trouble understanding X or Y, you do whatever is necessary to help them understand.

What you don't do is say "Oh COVID-19 vaccines? Yeah, go ahead, nothing to worry about, they're completely safe". It's not up to you to determine that they are safe, the patient makes that judgement. One person might consider them safe, another might not.

> since everyone is smart enough to make their own choice

They don't have to be "smart enough" to make choices. Unless they are mentally impaired to the point of dependence on a legal representative, they have the autonomy to decide about any matter regarding their own bodies. Even if they are uneducated. They could refuse it simply because they don't like vaccines or even you personally and it's your duty to respect that.

Unless the patient is literally dying right in front of you, there is no case you could make for overriding their will on any medical treatment, and even that varies by nation.

> so why be upset about it?

Because it's unethical and undermines trust. When you do this, people notice. They immediately stop trusting you and start actively resisting you instead. As is their right.

> when exactly where they lied to if you claim they're smart enough to dissect the nuance?

It's still a lie. Detecting the lie does not somehow invalidate the fact it is a lie.

There's a difference between a national public health messaging and a 1:1 discussion with your physician, and I don't think you're reasonably distinguishing between the two. No politician would spend 60 minutes discussing how they'll do Big Goal X and here's the 40-point plan. Read the fact sheet if you want the details or talk to your doctor. I got a fact sheet and had to wait for my vaccine, so plenty of time to read and ask questions or change my mind. And your points about the forcing of vaccination, I don't recall any instance of forced covid vaccine injections. Yes, in a parent comment you linked to something terrible that happened in the 1900s. Lots of terrible things happened in history.

There are people who have taken 2nd mortgages on their homes to send money to Trump for his “stop the steal” grift. People are too ignorant in general.

We shouldn't lie but 99% of college grads are either nominally or practically innumerate, a probability alone isn't enough

Our government, and the moderators at Twitter, lumped reasonable skeptics in the same category as grifter-anti-vax types (i.e., people pushing zinc, or colloidal silver, or chiropractic as "cures" for covid).

People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted.

This, and the fact that social media sites bow to Government pressure for this sort of moderations, is what's alarming to many reasonable people.

> People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted.

Do you have any non-vague examples? I saw those questions debated heavily throughout the pandemic and nobody was “deplatformed” for it.

This makes me curious whether there’s other context important to understanding what happened — and why the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects.

> the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects

Jay Battacharya[1][2] of the Great Barrington Declaration fame - is he a usual case? From [3]:

> In October 2020, Collins criticized the Great Barrington Declaration's "focused protection" herd immunity strategy, calling it "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment." In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said that "There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises". The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused Collins of "work[ing] with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration." and of "Shut[ting] Down Covid Debate".

Here's a bit more from the WSJ article[4] mentioned:

> In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.

From a recent interview in Unherd[5]:

> And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic.

> That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022.

Maybe deplatforming is not the same as having your Twitter account meddled with but it seems similar enough. There's also Martin Kulldorf[6][7]:

> Was Martin Kulldorff also on the Trends Blacklist?

> He had been, actually. His first placement on the trends blacklist was in July of 2020, when he was advocating for opening schools… He told me that what he was doing on Twitter was: whenever someone was mentioning that schools should close, he would post a link to the Swedish study that showed that when schools had opened in spring of 2020, no children had died and very few teachers had gotten sick relative to other workers in the population. He posted over and over and over, he said, and was more active on Twitter than at any other time. That’s exactly when the trends blacklist was applied on him, in July 2020. And then again, three more times in 2022. Although there was no active trends blacklist for Martin at the moment.

> Is it still active for you?

> It was still active when I was at Twitter. I hope it’s been removed. My tweets seem to go more viral nowadays.

Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is a biostatistician, epidemiologist and (edit: was until 2021) professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya

[2] https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins#NIH_director

[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barr...

[5] https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff

[7] https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...

He’s a common one and it’s worth remembering that despite lying about the severity of the disease and pushing myths about herd immunity, he was never deplatformed. Twitter chose not to have their company amplify his voice but his followers and organic discovery were unaffected.

> He’s a common one

How did he get into the "usual suspects" box?

> it’s worth remembering that despite lying about the severity of the disease

He wasn't just wrong or mistaken (if he was) or providing a different view, he was lying. That must be how he got into that box. I presume you have some sort of evidence, given such a bold claim?

> pushing myths about herd immunity

Would you care to give an example of that too? As I understand it, he was pushing the conventional line, conventional up until this pandemic, at least.

> Twitter chose not to have their company amplify his voice but his followers and organic discovery were unaffected.

That isn't true. From [1]:

> Actually, it’s a set of tools that include locking users out of searches and preventing some users’ tweets from trending—which is how countless other users discover what’s popular or being talked about on Twitter.

> “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter employee told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed this.

and from the Unherd interview I provided above:

> What I understand is that my Twitter messages can reach people who directly follow me. But they have no chance of being put on a broader visibility setting, so that people who don’t follow me would see my messages.

That means "organic discovery" is severely limited. I wonder if you would consider a hellban to be deplatforming or not.

[1] https://www.thefp.com/p/twitters-secret-blacklists

What moves him into probable deception for me is that he wasn’t just repeatedly wrong about everything of substance but that his errors were always aligned with something which made him money. Botching the methodology on the paper you’re using to argue for removing safeguards is bad but it’s worse not to mention that you were funded by one of the industries affected.

> I wonder if you would consider a hellban to be deplatforming or not.

I would consider it something which didn’t happen to him. Being blocked from trending based on his history of bad advice may not be something you like but it‘s nowhere near deplatforming unless you’re defining that term as meaning that you don’t get free promotion.

> Botching the methodology on the paper you’re using to argue for removing safeguards is bad but it’s worse not to mention that you were funded by one of the industries affected.

You're being too coy. Which industry and which paper? I'm not sure what's preventing you from being more specific, especially since you were lamenting vague examples earlier.

> unless you’re defining that term as meaning that you don’t get free promotion.

So if you can seemingly access a service but not be provided that service then you haven't been deplatformed? That sounds a lot like being given a telephone and a dial tone but you can only call out to prearranged numbers and meanwhile no one can call in nor find out your number and yet the phone company claims they're not denying you service. In other words, preposterous.

> lumped reasonable skeptics in the same category as grifter-anti-vax types

I would say they lumped themselves. Even the worst grifters know how to cloak their schemes in language of "free inquiry" and "skepticism" and so on. If the true skeptics do nothing at all to distinguish themselves from the grifters, that's on them. None of us are mind readers.

How could one make such a distinction? The key is that a true skeptic is not the same as a true believer in some alternative theory. A true skeptic will follow the scientific method - identifying specific flaws, being open to discussion of experiments to resolve open questions, etc. Most importantly, they will apply the same level of skepticism to alternatives or to other topics. A true believer, on the other hand, will push their own theory with weak evidence, weak connections, and no attempt to correct those flaws even as they're relentless in criticizing others. When you look past the whitewash of "all voices [but effectively only their own] deserve to be heard" rhetoric, it's usually not that hard to spot the difference.

Exercise for the reader: apply this method to the many comments here about "thrombo-embolic events" as an argument against vaccines (for any group or generally). How many of the people flinging that newly-learned term around are true skeptics, and how many are just reflexive contrarians?

Many people felt they couldn't even question the pharma/big gov narrative without being branded "internet weirdos and agitators" or anti-vax.

This is on part because whackos of all stripes often start with “I’m just asking questions here!” and then proceed to spout their nonsense.

The ‘signal’ of a people who are genuinely asking questions or voicing concerns is drowned by the ‘noise’ of charlatans, amoral self-publicists and genuine crazies.

man, skip talking about the vaccines, what about the refusal to simply utilize MASKS???

If you have them...

Are you referring to how the US Surgeon General told everyone masks didn’t work or something else?

It wasn’t simple. Next time, it will be important to be transparent about the tradeoffs of different types of material, and any need to route masks towards certain sectors being temporary. The strategy to feed the public a series of simplified messages was harmful from a public health perspective and sets the next pandemic response up for unnecessary challenges. All this is compatible with mandatory mask wearing, too.

The rhetoric from the public about masks being simple and obvious had the same problem on the friends-and-family scale.

In France a government official was explaining (while France had supply shortages) that masks required complex training to wear properly, and she herself did not know how to wear one, and so were useless to most people.

A few weeks later an emergency law was passed and you would receive a fine if not wearing them.

Similar situation in many countries.