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Comment by deadbunny | Hacker News Reader

How is a report from medical professionals on an abc affiliate contrarian?

It's contrarian if it cuts against the majority opinion, not if it comes from some obscure source from a lunatic. There are many legitimate contrarian opinions, many of which later become the mainstream opinion.

Because by far the dominant narrative among urban, educated people is that continuing lockdowns are worth it because they prevent death from COVID-19. Arguments that the lockdowns are doing more harm than good are (wrongly, IMHO) associated with political conservatism, rejection of science, and so on.

Thus, evidence of the harm of lockdowns can be considered contrarian, regardless of whether it comes from medical professionals.

I have never been in an accident where I was helped by wearing a seatbelt, and preparations for Y2K cost many times more than any of the harm that was caused by Y2K bugs. Considering that I've never experienced malnutrition, I seem to waste a lot of time money and effort on nutrition, too.

Ignoring mental health consequences of difficult times is foolish, but this sounds much more like it was a "well, actually" sort of conversation meant to stroke people's egos.

The argument isn't that that point of view is correct. The argument is that it should be allowed to be presented.

Do they want to present it or to misrepresent it?

The problem is that Google is exposed to political, financial, and legislative risks from all sides -- or else Google would host all content, including pirated movies, and they'd pass off all liability to the primary offender.

Then they'd collect advertising revenue based on all the eyeballs they can get.

To be honest this is a novel disease that is affecting the world a lot right now and we simply don't know the best way forward.

This is not the flu, it is much worse, but we are generally not enforcing "seat belts" to protect the vulnerable even close to as much.

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