Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is not self-contained to a singular individual.

Its also a problem for the platform - who is now party to it happening.

YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube. Their safest option, is to disallow it.

> Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is not self-contained to a singular individual.

The stats I've seen suggest the vast majority of people have caught COVID between 2019 and now and pretty much all the preventative measures that worked reliably were things that either individuals could do themselves or that required targeting travellers specifically.

It isn't obvious that people trusting YouTube about COVID affects any third party. Who and how are they affecting?

Even if we assume that's true (everything I've seen says it isn't), then a sole individual always affects others. Humans do not exist as lone monks in the hills, generally speaking. When they are ill, it affects their workplaces, it affects their families, it affects their friends. When they die, it's worse - it affects all of those, but also has tail effects on the health industry.

Nothing you do, ever, is in isolation. So nothing you do, ever, will not affect someone else. Pretending that everyone is a sole unit, to excuse behaviour, has never made sense.

I mean, ok. Everything is connected to everything else, true enough. That seems a bit vague. Do you have a specific example to illustrate what you are talking about? Because the 'disinformation' that I saw being banned was typically people with PhDs in vaguely related fields talking about scientific papers. Disagreeing with them seems like a fair play, deplatforming them seems actually damaging. If I can't listen to people with PhDs to learn about academic papers because everything is interconnected then something has gone rather off the rails.

The disinformation I saw turned into accidental deaths. By attempting to treate the virus with alcohol, horse tranquilisers, and more. And those deaths are verified.

People weren't listening to PhDs getting banned. They were listening to influencers get banned.

So are you talking about your neighbours and relatives here? Like someone next door tried feeding someone else alcohol when their spouse got COVID? What actually happened?

> People weren't listening to PhDs getting banned. They were listening to influencers get banned.

I'm a people, you know.

People died. [0] I'm not talking anecdotes, because that's pointless when discussing why a company acts.

[0] https://www.ajtmh.org/view/journals/tpmd/103/4/article-p1621...

> YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube.

YouTube censoring videos people want to see will also hurt YouTube.

I don't think that is so certain - or a viable alternative would be competing with them.

Evidently not very much.

> YouTube allowing medical advice not endorsed by pharma-infiltrated FDA will hurt YouTube.

Fixed that for you

This doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. Big Pharma would benefit from everyone taking ivermectin to cure their covid, yet content about that was removed. Google is bigger than the entire Pharma industry, and only a couple Pharma companies had covid vaccines.

There's also a ton of general anti-pharma content on YouTube that they'd get taken down, demonetized, etc if they had any power over YouTube.

> Big Pharma would benefit from everyone taking ivermectin

I don't follow. Why would Big pharma benefit from everyone taking ivermectin since its off patent and ultra cheap?

Even if you don't care about those people, what about the people who would be affected by them? A would-be bomb-maker might only blow themselves up, or they may kill many in a crowd. Somebody walking around with a deadly pathogen infects and kills others. Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense. Individual freedom ends at the point at which it causes real harm to other people.

Also, you know who tends to be most in favour of "let stupid people face the consequences of their poor choices"? Those who want to profit from those people and their choices.

> Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense

Do we know how many otherwise healthy children caught Covid and died from it?

My impression from the official figures is that in most countries the number is vanishingly small if not zero.

Well, it's CERTAINLY not ZERO... I recall seeing numerous articles about overweight children dying of it, for example

Remember that even polio only put like 1% of its victims into an iron lung

I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with GP, but I would imagine they would argue that an overweight kid is not "otherwise healthy children."

And I would argue that lives have value even when people have preexisting medical conditions.

I certainly don't disagree with that, and I would imagine there aren't many people who would, but it is not in any way an argument against how many otherwise healthy children died of covid.

If you want to make an argument that an overweight child should still be considered otherwise healthy, that would be a welcome and relevant argument, and also an interesting one.

I am saying that narrowing the discussion to "otherwise healthy children" is a reductive to a silly degree. The point is to protect all children, many of which are not otherwise healthy, or for that matter, may become unhealthy at some point.

> The point is to protect all children

You'd close schools to protect a minority of children with comorbidities from a virus which doesn't threaten the vast majority of children, knowing that school closures will definitely damage all children?

Umm.

Nobody suggested anything of that sort in this entire thread.

Is it really true about "vast majority"? In US, at least, it seems that the number of children with comorbidities such as obesity would actually be pretty high. You could argue that it's still a minority so long as it's under 50%, but I think that closing schools to protect, say, 20% of kids from a virus that can kill them is eminently reasonable.

> I would argue that lives have value even when people have preexisting medical conditions

(Otherwise healthy) school-age children - and younger adults - always faced a very low risk from Covid-19, and we had solid statistical data on this from at least May 2020 onwards.

Maybe we need to look at where our decision-makers get their information, and their incentives?

Again, that's all fine and great. However, many people are not "otherwise healthy" today, and nobody knows who is going to be "otherwise healthy" tomorrow.

Okay, what is the trade-off for ignoring that risk? What's a few extra dead kids, right? They weren’t healthy anyway, it’s just Darwinian.

Much easier just to suspect an unfounded conspiracy instead.

Maybe your username should be “empathyfail”

If you take the percentages from the CDC and multiply them out (and don't fall for the "polio" vs "paralytic polio" sleight of hand), it was way smaller than that - somewhere on the order of 0.01%.

The flu, for example, was always a worse risk than polio, people just became fearful of polio because we found a way to save some lives in a non-ideal way, which became very visible.

Presented as fact without evidence, preemptively dismissing contrary evidence from the most likely source to have the historical data. I'd love to see your sources for the risk of severe lifelong injury or death of polio vs the flu.

So many caveats to this comment...

> "otherwise healthy"

Yeah, not all kids are otherwise healthy. There's kids with Leukemia or whatever that are extremely immunocompromised because of chemotherapy. They have to coexist with anti-vaxxers and, believe it or not, their lives matter too.

> caught Covid

You think the anti-vaxx crazy train starts and stops at Covid? These people have been attacking MMR for much longer than Covid. Children DO die to measles, mumps, and what have you.

In my state it was 2.

The absolute number.

No, it's everyone's. Herd immunity can only be achieved if a sufficiently large part of the population is vaccinated. Also, and I know basic empathy is a foreign concept nowadays, but what if I wished for my fellow to not die of a preventable disease because a grifter sold them on an insane idea?

there is no long term herd immunity with coronaviruses; which is why they are often use in disaster prevention scenarios...

what you call "herd immunity" is merely letting people die and then go "we have herd immunity" as part of your survivor bias

only solution that works most of the time, regardless of pathogen (including covid): air filtration (respirators and/or whole room)

There absolutely is. You just think the word immunity means something else.

After vaccination or a passed infection the immune response is there. When a sufficient immune resopnse from a large enough portion if the population is enough to lower the critical cases below some threshold, we call that type of immunity herd immunity.

It's not binary, but a useful concept nonetheless, and one that some people devote their professional lives to. It can be observed every flu season.

Herd immunity is not a direct goal of vaccination, protection of the individual being vaccinated is. If someone needs protection, then they should get vaccinated!

Then why did we ask small kids to be vaccinated for COVID when they had no serious risk of anything? Rhetorical question, of course.

I am not sure about America but in India, I was a child during covid, 7th grade - 8th grade and i didn't have a vaccine but my school students just one grade above us were called in school and they were asked for vaccine.

Though, to be fair, my whole family caught a "virus" during 2nd phase except my father but we didn't go to hospital and just bed rest for 2-3 days. My family really were skeptical of vaccine but personally I don't mind vaccines and would prefer it.

Even more, why did we REQUIRE them to be vaccinated for COVID.

> Then why did we ask small kids to be vaccinated for COVID when they had no serious risk of anything?

Think of the children ... :-)

On the contrary, for the overwhelming majority of children you're absolutely right, they didn't have serious risk from COVID-19, which makes your question a good one, not a rhetorical one.

Regardless, herd immunity was not a serious possibility at any point (given the high Rº and lack of a vaccine that could prevent transmission), which, considering this was known very early on makes your question, again, a good one not a rhetorical one, despite your intent.

Finally, regardless of herd immunity, at risk individuals would still require vaccination, which makes the herd immunity as a goal, again, irrelevant, which is where I started. It's a nice by-product.

> Herd immunity can only be achieved if a sufficiently large part of the population is vaccinated.

...or getting infected, of course.

Unfortunately, thus far, Covid19 has been through too many rapid changes for natural immunity to be effective. [0] The earlier forms allowed for it, but the evolution of the virus has outstripped most natural defences.

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

But somehow the vaccines catch up on the strains before they come out?

They attack different things in the virus. Often multiple things at once. Which really should not be surprising.

You got it backwards: the vaccines specifically targeted only the spike protein, while natural infection created different antibodies against all parts of the virus.

Novavax COVID-19 vaccine never targeted specifically the spike protein, and instead focused on boosting the creation of various different antibodies. It is also the least effective.

The current breed of mRNA vaccines targets the spike protein, and the TRIM21 gene. Some of them also attack the S protein directly.

All of them work to boost various antibodies. The "targets" are in addition. By targeting the spike protein, the attack hits the RNA of the virus, not just the protein. The entire cellular structure of the virus breaks down. The same with TRIM21 targets.

The bodies natural defences never targeted the spike protein, and instead focuses on the N-layer, not "all parts of the virus". These natural defences rarely manage to cause the viral cell to decay, they tend to work by slowing reproduction instead.

Novavax's vaccine was also spike-protein-only, the difference between theirs and the mRNA ones was they created it artificially in moths then extracted it for the vaccine instead of generating inside the human body.

No, it was a vector vaccine.

Novavax was called "protein subunit", not "vector" - you're probably thinking of J&J and AstraZeneca which were adenovirus-vector - but also still just encoded the spike protein.

sadly getting infected just means the virus will nuke your immune system (not to mention your endothelium)

Of course vaccines don’t prevent you from catching the virus, that is not how they work. They train your immune system so it’s better at fighting the virus when it enters your body.

This reduces the chances of your immune system being overwhelmed by the virus, reduces your recovery time, reduces your symptoms, and therefore reduces the chances of you spreading it to other people.

Even Pfizer recognized they never produced any data to support that in their trials. So the government was lying all along.

... Most vaccines do not completely prevent you from contracting a virus.

They reduce the liklihood, and thus reduce the footprint.

Heck, the concept of herd immunity is about protecting individuals who cannot be vaccinated at all. By reducing a virus' footprint.

there is no long term herd immunity with coronaviruses; which is why they are often use in disaster prevention scenarios...

what you call "herd immunity" is merely letting people die...

Herd immunity, for some definitions of a debated term, is absolutely achievable - and lasting. [0]

> Technically, then, a population can reach herd immunity even with low levels of the pathogen still circulating, which means it hasn't necessarily been eradicated for good. The point, ultimately, is that herd immunity may not be the right shorthand to refer to the end of the pandemic. It’s been bandied about incorrectly, certainly imprecisely, Fine says. “I think people often haven’t a clue what they’re saying.”

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8166024/