Hacker News Reader

Comment by mariodiana | Hacker News Reader

I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices. I'm subscribed to the channel of an M.D. on YouTube who discusses COVID-19, vaccines, etc. He is very careful to (repeatedly) point out that he is vaccinated, he has personally vaccinated hundreds of patients, he encourages everyone to speak to their doctor and follow their recommendations, believing that the vaccine is beneficial for the overwhelming majority of people. But, for all that, he has had videos taken down, and worries that it will happen again.

Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).

People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform. It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

View on HN

I was banned from a Reddit sub for saying that a previous Covid infection probably infers some immunity. This was around 8 months ago. Now EU vaccine passports accept a recovery from infection as being sufficient proof of immunity.

On top of that now it's coming out that the Canadian military/government (and likely others) was intentionally deploying propaganda to make the populace more compliant.

This is why moderate voices are being drowned out. I got vaccinated pretty much as soon as it was available to me. Yet to some on the left, I'm a rabid anti-vaxxer (!?!) and to my anti-vaxx friends, a sell-out (ironically, they're far less angry, just disappointed in me for not pushing back against government overreach).

Anyone who shames you for taking/not taking a form of medicine can safely be ignored. I know it's easier said than done but things like HIPAA exist for a reason. It's no one's business.

> It’s no one’s business

I must assume you are unfamiliar with the history of Typhoid Mary. Public health is everyone’s business.

Except when it concerns risky sexual behavior, or so we were told just a generation ago.

Really? Has any public health authority said "it no one's business whether you have unprotected sex with strangers"? On the contrary, there were and there are many campaigns to get people to have less risky behaviors.

Campaigns to inform, yes! And that allowed those engaged in risky sexual behavior to make decisions for themselves. But shutting down the bathhouses and swingers parties and park bathrooms was considered a violation of rights.

Now contrast that approach with mandates and arresting store owners and closing businesses.

the lack of a strong public health response to the hiv epidemic was certainly NOT based from a place of respecting the rights of those who engaged in minority sexual behaviors, but the complete opposite - the mainstream culture didn’t particularly care if they, or intravenous drug users, lived or died.

to claim otherwise is ludicrous.

to claim otherwise is ludicrous.

Nonsense. From Arthur Ashe to Ryan White to Magic Johnson, there was continuous noise and encouragement around HIV prevention and research through the entire period. And narratives were manipulated then, too. Even into the early 90s, there was widespread public thought that HIV might be spread through saliva, even though the research was pretty clear it was spread almost exclusively via anal sex and intravenous drug use (and blood transfusions from an HIV+ donor).

What does that have to do with respecting human rights? The gp is correct in that most of society didn’t care about the “gay disease” hurting the undesirables so they didn’t put effort into fixing it. They weren’t refusing to use government or corporate power to enforce controls on behavior out of some noble intention to preserve the rights of the minority groups affected

What? Many countries wrote laws specifically forcing people with HIV to register themselves and to disclose it to sexual partners. In fact the relevant laws used for covid in my country where those written to combat HIV.

I’m in the USA and my comment was in that context - I forget sometimes that HN has a global audience.

Using the most extreme possible examples to justify a policy.

LOL. A global pandemic that causes extreme healthcare crises might require extreme policies. “Using the most extreme possible examples to justify a policy,” how laughable!

Next, read about Quarantine Acts. Most nations have them.

An outlier example from 1907.

Oh Yeah?

Tell that to the President Of The United States; Or the tens of thousands of NY health workers just fired.

Care to think about the vaccinated health workers who get breakthrough infection and transfer it to their unvaccinated daughter who had to get a lung transplant? (real story from US)

Your argument is that a vaccinated person with a breakthrough infection can not give another vaccinated person a breakthrough infection?

Obviously your anecdotal story is tragic. No denying. But the ends don't justify the means.

Most of these health workers have been on the frontlines since the beginning before the vaccine. Many already aquired COVID and have some natural immunity.

I leave you with this:

How about the story of the girl who died because there weren't enough healthcare workers to treat her in time because they were all fired?

More health workers are fed up with constant stream of unvaccinated patients in hospitals (also a big overlap between assholes and unvaccinated in USA where vaccines are available), so they would rather want everyone to be vaccinated. Ask your doctor friends and relatives.

What would your imaginary girl do when all ICU beds are occupied by the unvaccinated?

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/never-ending-nigh...

This is a different argument.

You're talking about the unvaccinated masses of patients.

The NY mandate was for nurses who worked throughout the pandemic.

We could debate the merits of mandated vaccination for the general public but this mandate is putting a squeeze on healthcare workers which will likely contribute to a worker shortage that will not be without it's own collateral damage.

At Houston Methodist, where 150 employees left from a work force of about 26,000 people, the hospital said that there had been little lasting effect on its ability to hire people. And when Texas was hit with rising numbers of Covid cases over the summer, the hospital found that fewer of its workers were out sick.

“The mandate has not only protected our employees, but kept more of them at work during the pandemic,” a hospital spokeswoman said in an email.

ChristianaCare, a hospital group based in Wilmington, Del., said on Monday that it had fired 150 employees for not complying with its vaccine mandate. But the group emphasized that over the last month it had hired more than 200 employees, many of whom are more comfortable working where they knew their colleagues were vaccinated.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/health/us-hospital-worker...

Thanks for your detailed response.

This is great news for the hospitals bottom line!

Not such great news for the hopeful mothers planning or already carrying a child who wouldn't wish their unborn offspring as a medical experiment. These are real people with real concerns. Not crazies who think there is a microchip in the shot. Studies on long term fetal impact are impossible with the mandated timeline.

If a woman has a pro-choice right to abortion, then it seems a pro-choice right to a medical injection is in order. The two points are logically inconsistent with each other.

Sincerly,

~ A Covid Vaccinated Citizen

PS. See below [1] for reasons why someone might question a fast developed medication.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fQ6JklHjBc

You have a pro choice right to not get injected. You don’t have a pro choice right to not get the vaccine, not get tested, and move about freely amongst others because you are now violating others bodily autonomy en masse by spreading disease.

If you aren’t fine with someone walking around firing a gun randomly in the air because the bullets “might” land on someone then I don’t see how you can be fine with someone walking around during a pandemic with no sorts of proof that they aren’t spreading the disease at a high rate.

Both behaviors are a not guaranteed to cause harm, but the likelyhood has risen high enough to warrant preventative measures

I was under the mistaken belief that vaccinated people could still spread the virus. Thanks for the correction. Which begs the question. Who are we protecting? That group has chose to not be protected. The argument is circular.

Disclaimer: I support vaccination. I do not support authoritarian mandates in this case.

Vaccinated people can still spread the virus _if they have a breakthrough infection_.

Since they have a radically lower incident of infection compared to the non vaccinated, the rate of transfer of Covid for the two groups is in no way equivalent.

Thanks for the opportunity to correct your misunderstanding.

Disclaimer: I do support people’s right’s to make decisions for themselves. I do not support people foisting their negative externalities on the rest of society under the guise that their actions have no side effects.

Enjoying this exchange!

A "breakthrough infection" is still an infection, No? It seems that sophisticated semantics are being used in media to veil underlying weakness in the arguments and premises and move the goal post.

> That group has chose to not be protected.

The side effects of people choosing not to get vaccinated is that they will get sicker because they choose not to get vaccinated, Yes?

It is not my business if they self-risk getting sicker, or if they consume to much sugar, or don't exercise enough, or sky-dive.

Surely you can see how this narrative becomes a circular self contradictory "double bind" [1] that could go on forever. It's a very fascinating way to indirectly exert control [2].

[1] A double bind is a dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more reciprocally conflicting messages. In some scenarios (e.g. within families or romantic relationships) this can be emotionally distressing, creating a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), such that the person responding will automatically be perceived as in the wrong, no matter how they response. This double bind prevents the person from either resolving the underlying dilemma or opting out of the situation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind)

[2] Double binds are often utilized as a form of control without open coercion—the use of confusion makes them difficult both to respond to and to resist. ((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind)

Enjoying the exchange as well!

>A "breakthrough infection" is still an infection, No? It seems that sophisticated semantics are being used in media to veil underlying weakness in the arguments and premises and move the goal post.

What is the per capita rate of infection between the unvaccinated population and the vaccinated population? I feel like you may be unaware that the while the vaccinated and unvaccinated population spread Covid at the same rate when they are infected, you seem to not understand that the vaccinated population gets infected at a far lower rate than the unvaccinated population.

>The side effects of people choosing not to get vaccinated is that they will get sicker because they choose not to get vaccinated, Yes?

>It is not my business if they self-risk getting sicker, or if they consume to much sugar, or don't exercise enough, or sky-dive.

Ah, ok. Maybe we need to make sure we have a baseline understanding of reality.

Do you, or do you not believe in the concept of negative externalities? For example, if I walk into public and lay out a pile of radioactive waste do you believe that

A:This is not an acceptable action in society because it hurts others

B: It is acceptable because no one has been hurt yet and we cannot constrain someone's actions until they have damaged someone else in a provable manner

C:a third option I have not thought of, as I am open to new kinds of thinking.

I do believe in negative externalities!

But! If choosing to prevent one negative externality causes another negative externality, well you're proper fucked now! Hence the "double bind".

Now in regards to your proposed question. Radioactive waste is a totally different issue. So that's a hard A!

Now if the question is:

If an unvaccinated person walks into a public space filled with other vaccinated and unvaccinated people all of which made their own personal choice based on their personal circumstances.

C.) Well that's just life right? Freedom is inherently risky. Life for that matter.

People die needlessly because they aren't treated in hospitals because the hospitals are too full with people with covid. The ends justify the means. Vaccination mandates are nothing new and covid justifies it so that life can go on again. We are not only throwing people under the bus who are horribly misinformed (imo misinformation is a euphemism) but also those who are immunocompromised and those I talked about earlier who can't get treatment for anything else.

It’s everyone’s business. Vaccinations are to protect a population. Some industries require vaccinations before the employee can work and this isn’t a new behaviour. Not looking after staff and those the staff interact with would seem negligent and a potential liability.

I agree, we should also require people to disclose their sexually transmitted diseases publicly. Especially HIV, which is fatal when left untreated and for all but the most wealthy it's detected so late it's a death sentence. It's important that we insure these people with HIV are not only publicly shamed, but also are barred from employment where they may transmit their disease.

This is what you mean, right? A real deadly disease being an actual public health concern, to the point that we should not only publicly shame people, but also bar them from employment?

It is illegal in many places not to disclose HIV status with sexual partners. If you could transmit HIV by just being in the same room with someone for 15 minutes, then absolutely you should be required to disclose it.

You are already required to disclose it, just not publicly, so I do not get your point.

> Thanks to California Senate Bill 329, as of January 1, 2017, it is no longer a felony for people who are HIV-positive to have unprotected sex and not disclose their status.[0]

[0]https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/laws/do-i-have-to-tell-a-s...

I think you know that's argument is fallacious - getting AIDS from an infected person requires very specific interaction to take place.

No, I don’t mean that and I think you known that.

I also believe you mean ‘ensure’, not ‘insure’.

Reddit has a way of drowning out moderate voices which is why I no longer use it

It's not just Reddit.

One of the tragedies of the Internet is that it deprives people of the opportunity to see the faces of everyone in the room when someone's talking. In real life, you can see that two people are loudly arguing and the other eight people in the room are looking at each other uncomfortably, or wandering away and congregating in a different room. On the Internet, you're not even aware of anyone but the hotheads, so it's all too easy to forget that they exist, and come to believe that their opinions are normal.

Which, since nobody likes to feel like they're the only one who thinks a certain way, probably does end up discouraging people from having moderate opinions over the long run.

Well said, seconded. The tragedy of the uncommons.

+1 another side effect of internet is normalization of fringe behavior. Imagine some subculture/behavior that expresses one in 100k (0.0001% of people). And imagine most people know something on the order of 1000 ppl IRL. If those subcultured people congregate on the internet (~4.5B) we find a group of about 45k people which overwhelmingly validates that behavior to the group because it's a group so much larger than everyone they know in real life. It feels like it's so much more normal (as in within a std deviation) than it truly is.

It's totally benign when it's something like fans of silly hats, but also quite dark when its a criminal behavior.

This one factor explains so many of the niche issues that have exploded into the “mainstream”. Or more accurately: they’ve created an illusion of being mainstream.

This effect is so strong that some of the topics can barely be discussed any more without putting livelihoods and even personal safety at risk.

And it's not just social media either. Traditional media plays a big role in framing the discussion, as in every debate they make a point in making sure that to the other side of the responsible and well spoken scientist there's some rabid lunatic; thus the finer points never see the light of the day and everyone else trying to raise them gets bunched with the lunatics.

The mere suggestion that covid came out of a lab was banned by youtube, and downvoted by Reddit and HN heavily at the time. You were considered a crazy person. Now its the leading theory. It shows how fast people listen to authoritarians in desperate times despite common sense lingering in the background. That phenomenon has led to terrible events in the past and carries forward today. If someone says you cant discuss/debate something be suspicious.

You make a good point, but to be clear a lab leak is not "the leading theory", it is a plausible theory.

It's clear that COVID-19 is a bat virus isolated in or near laos that was then modified by EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak such that it can infect humans at the WIV or the nearby Chinese equivalent to the CDC.

All of the investigations into the origin of COVID-19 have Daszak on their advisory boards, the conflict of interest is literally insane.

The idea that a lab leak isn't the most likely cause is just willful ignorance at this point.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/03/26/sanjay-gupta-ex...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28656209 [2] https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

When it goes from a 'racist conspiracy theory' to something that mainstream politicians and the media are talking about while the west is isolating China for not-so-obvious reasons, it becomes a leading theory. The amount of anti-China propaganda has been steadily increasing while the wet-market theory has been all but buried.

It is the leading theory though, isn’t it? The alternative (zoonotic transfer with no lab involvement) still has far less evidence to support it.

Can you provide more info re: compliance propaganda? I haven't heard about that.

There was an article on the front page of HN about it yesterday (maybe day before). Became decently big news in Canada.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/milita...

YouTube does not deserve our trust.

We've seen repeatedly over the last two years truthful and helpful warnings classified as dangerous misinformation by big tech platforms.

First they censored people warning us about COVID itself, then they censored people saying we should wear masks, then they censored any talk of it coming from a lab.

Every time citizens try to spread the truth, they are censored. Sometimes the truth becomes so obvious that they can't censor anymore.

Facebook is directly responsible for censoring American expat groups in China that were trying to warn their families about COVID in late 2019.

Facebook has no problem shielding criminals and dictators for money[1]. They will eagerly censor innocent people speaking truth to power.

Corporate America will protect its interests from the people. They are invested in a new normal, and China, and they will censor us to protect their investments.

Even if something was wrong with the vaccines, or there was some effective new treatment, they would censor it regardless. So why should we ever big tech platforms the benefit of the doubt?

[1]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/sheryl-sandberg...

> Every time citizens try to spread the truth, they are censored.

You actually mean spread an opinion. I doubt any one citizen would conduct a trial or research; some may actually look at data, but that is rare. These are opinions, most likely biased by a belief.

> You actually mean spread an opinion. I doubt any one citizen would conduct a trial or research; some may actually look at data, but that is rare. These are opinions, most likely biased by a belief.

You could say that about most breaking news.

It is not reasonable to expect people to conduct a rigorous field research before sharing their observations, especially if people's lives are on the line.

I distinctly remember citizen journalists sharing videos and pictures of the chaos in China at the end of 2019, trying to warn us. I remember all the tech platforms and our media doing everything they could to suppress it.

Sounds about right for reddit. It is anti free speech and anti education. If it sounds good but is made up and spreading lies, top of the posts you go.

There's an overwhelming tendency now to boil down all opinions to either "right side of history" or "wrong side of history", "anti-science" or "pro-science". This is especially true on social media, YouTube. etc.

Out in the real world there is so much nuance. There are actually black people who don't agree with BLM. There are intellectual people who don't think they need the vaccine. There are Democrats who are pro-life. There are Republicans who support gay marriage. There are bunch of undecided people on a bunch of topics.

We are not all on one side or the other. There is so much middle ground. I still believe most people are in the vast expanse of middle ground.

It just doesn't look that way on the Internet.

This is so spot on. I have seen countless of times in forums how if someone voices concern about a vaccine they are immediately called "Trump supporter", even though they might not even be from the US. Especially in US though it seems that in people's minds there's just 2 types of people, one are allies and the other are enemies. Allies all have the exact same beliefs, and enemies exactly the opposite. Therefore if someone has a belief that doesn't agree with mine it means they must also hold all the other beliefs and must be of the enemy group. I think it's more than ridiculous. And you also can't hold a belief that's in between the other beliefs, this immediately means you are the enemy.

Ironically it was the liberals I most associated with opposition to vaccines in the recent past. In 2020 everything just became so much more polarized.

And this is a dogshit simplistic way to view the world that leads to our. Social media and all of this tribalism makes all American dumber. It's removing our ability to understand and appreciate nuance and learning how to get along with those who think differently.

And it's happening at pace in part because the polarization drives "engagement" which means $$

And imagine a country which legislates "two parties" in myriad ways, lecturing and sanctioning the rest of the world on what "democracy" means.

There's something in human nature such that when we learn something that we don't like about someone else, we wish to think them even worse, perhaps to feel justified in our own hatred.

I like the way C. S. Lewis wrote it:

> The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that," or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black.

Frogpelt has an understanding that so many lack. I wish there was some way for this middle ground to speak and make itself now.

This "tribal" devolution of everything to two sides on an issue with interlocking viewpoints on all subjects is a major problem in our current climate.

I agree the nuance of this situation is lost when there are so many people who do not see the nuance to begin with.

A culture that cannot understand nuance is a culture more likely to go to war. To see others as "other", not seeking common ground, but seeing things that differ as reasons to hate

That nuance is the same reason the people complain about the Democratic Party having poor messaging.

The masses don't spread nuanced messages. Instead, the simpler & more emotion-based a message is, the more likely it'll go viral.

Society in general has been making chilling moves away from free speech, and this has been accelerated by the pandemic. I hope the pendulum will swing the other way, but it's also possible to cross a tipping point where we just lose our way.

It's funny to me because Free Speech is one of those topics on its own that doesn't permit nuance in my experience - either you're for it or you're a dictator/sheep/lapdog/etc.

In reality though, laws have been limiting speech for hundreds of years, and those laws and judgements are enforced by the government. The idea that it is sacrosanct and is (and should "continue" to be) unabated is already not what happens. The usual example is about shouting bomb in an airport or fire in a crowded movie theatre but those are more about mischief than any freedom to say a thing (you aren't punished for the words alone). However, Libel and Slander laws exist and have for a long long time and are limits on free speech.

I'm not in favor of draconian laws designed to chill debate but it's important to recognize that limits already exist and how we navigate where to draw the line is the key I think.

Nobody complained when social media sites shut down ISIL videos or Taliban content. And why would they? Those are bad ideas from bad people! But anti-vaccine content? Why, that could be your neighbor! And your neighbor doesn't deserve to be censored (unlike the evil people who definitely needed to be)

That's a very selective interpretation on events. ISIS propaganda spread like wildfire through Twitter. The administration did nothing and the media barely made a peep about the root cause until the horses had already left the barn. None of these "concerned" stakeholders gave a shit about the socially corrosive nature of social media and they still don't beyond their own interests.

Where's your proof that the administration did nothing? Shutting down terrorism content is about the easiest political slam dunk imaginable.

I have never seen ISIS propaganda. Plenty of "Fauci went to school with Bill Gates and was CEO of Moderna" memes, though.

>Where's your proof that the administration did nothing? Shutting down terrorism content is about the easiest political slam dunk imaginable.

Before they were terrorists they were "insurgents" of the "Arab Spring". Something that the administration and Twitter/SM were more than willing to lean into before they lost control of the situation.

>I have never seen ISIS propaganda. Plenty of "Fauci went to school with Bill Gates and was CEO of Moderna" memes, though.

That's more a function of your age and filter bubble not whether there was ISIS propaganda which is well documented.

What remains undocumented however is your claim that no action was taken.

This is a very strange approach to discourse. What action do you think was taken and where's the documentation?

The administration was openly showing support for the Arab Spring mobs and even built up a military coalition in its support. Lack of knowledge on current events isn't the same as taking a skeptical stance.

I mean, this isn't really true: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpomete...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/technology-once-used...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/07...

...

Social media companies actually had a hugely successful anti-ISIS recruiting and propoganda campaign. This was something that everyone wanted a bit of credit for, but was ultimately totally uncontroversial because terrorists bad and no one complains when companies deplatform them.

Your assertion is orthogonal to the original thread. When the "Arab Spring" started all the talking heads were going on about free speech, Democratic values, the positive role social media is playing, and beating the war drums. It's only after the situation had started threatening geopolitical interests did the tune change.

>Social media companies actually had a hugely successful anti-ISIS recruiting and propoganda campaign.

I question if that's the case. That's like closing the barn doors after the horses have already left. The networks were already in place. The damage already done.

Aggregators like r/syriancivilwar had no shortage of atrocities to share most of which directly from social media.

I'm having a hard time seeing your point. It seems like you're saying that because [entities] only started to do online counterinsurgency once ISIS was somewhat established, those entities didn't actually try to shutdown extremist content.

And well that's silly for two reasons. The first is that the social media landscape was very different 10 years (yeah really!) ago when the Arab Spring started, the companies didn't have "stop terrorism" on their radar.

The second is well until 2013 or 2014, ISIS wasn't really a thing (of note). So no one cared. For better or worse, denoting something as a terrorist organization matters. Countering terrorist propoganda sounds a lot better than countering propoganda put out by arab spring protestors agitating for more democratic governments.

And actually a third is that a lot of the initial arab spring was explicitly about pro-democratic and non-muslim or more secular governments. So this whole complaint doesn't make a lot of sense. Like yes, people were in favor of the use of social media for democratic organizing.

I'm just very confused, what point are you trying to convey.

>I'm having a hard time seeing your point.

The start of this thread is a comparative juxtaposition of anti-vaxxer and terrorist content. I think that's an interesting thought experiment but requires historical context with an emphasis on the roles social media and realpolitik played. Put bluntly, social media is socially corrosive, we are experiencing a non-partisan leadership vacuum, and all these polarizing events aren't as different as they seem.

>And well that's silly for two reasons. The first is that the social media landscape was very different 10 years (yeah really!) ago when the Arab Spring started, the companies didn't have "stop terrorism" on their radar.

10 years later and social media is still driven by polarizing engagement metrics and addictive anti-patterns. Banning content is an insufficient bandaid at best and scapegoat at worst. Fundamentally the same landscape.

>And actually a third is that a lot of the initial arab spring was explicitly about pro-democratic and non-muslim or more secular governments. So this whole complaint doesn't make a lot of sense. Like yes, people were in favor of the use of social media for democratic organizing.

It's not a given that it was about democracy any more it's a given antivaxxers are about safety/freedom. Are these the real issues, are they proxy issues, or is it layers of both?

occasionally I like to view the internet through a translating service. It's fascinating how different the world becomes outside Western European languages.

Try it.

>Nobody complained when social media sites shut down ISIL videos or Taliban content.

People did. You didn't hear about it because they were brushed aside as free speech extremists and wacko libertarians.

Or they were kids and too young to comment or understand the situation. I would have protested then if I were an adult with my life understanding now.

Imagine if they used their powers to shut down something that's actually harmful, like, I don't know, sex trafficking.

If they put as much energy into stifling human trafficking as they did dissenting covid opinions, we might make a dent in it.

I didn't cheer. I don't cheer unless the videos are snuff (a beheading) or pornographic (not in ISIS' case).

For the later I wouldn't even erase such content from the internet. All I demand is a proper age verification system for viewers and the actors. More guarantees that the actresses aren't, in fact, being abused by their situation would be nice - what can I say, I dare to dream.

So you agree that there should be restrictions on speech that negatively impacts public health then. You just disagree on where the line should be drawn.

Those were essentially recruitment videos for enemies we were literally at war with. If we are literally at war with individuals skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccines, we should say so.

> In reality though, laws have been limiting speech for hundreds of years, and those laws and judgements are enforced by the government. The idea that it is sacrosanct and is (and should "continue" to be) unabated is already not what happens. The usual example is about shouting bomb in an airport or fire in a crowded movie theatre but those are more about mischief than any freedom to say a thing (you aren't punished for the words alone). However, Libel and Slander laws exist and have for a long long time and are limits on free speech.

Why is it that I have never heard these laws cited outside the context of justifying additional restrictions on freedom of speech, and especially restrictions on political speech? Without digging for an example, when is the last time you personally encountered someone who was prosecuted for saying a naughty word in a movie theater or saying mean things about someone online?

Well, a few days ago we had this article on HN...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682582

(Tesla suing people for defamation over social media posts)

> either you're for it or you're a dictator/sheep/lapdog/etc.

This is the nature of the things we come to see as rights. Why is an X a 'right' and not just a nice idea? Because of a history of political entrepreneurs pushing, pushing, pushing against it -- it's just a reasonable tradeoff for this case, can't you see?

A right is a Schelling fence beyond which the 'reasonable' tradeoffs must face a much stronger presumption against them. Of course the world is complicated. One of the most salient complications is the ubiquity through history of clever people with justifications why they need power over others. When in this context you bring up the indisputable fact that no human question is 100% clear, the effect is to weaken the fence.

This is true, there are no absolute rights. However, the examples you cite have no resemblance to the stifling of careful discussion which might, in some way, question the wisdom of universal vaccination or inquire about the long-term effects, etc. That kind of speech is qualitatively different from incitement to violence and other clear and present danger cases. So I'm not sure how pointing out that in some abstract sense rights are never absolute has any bearing on this discussion. The chilling of speech in the public square that we are currently witnessing has no clear limits and the logic used to justify it ends up making this tantamount to setting up some kind of a wrongspeak standard. In a free society, individuals must be uninhibited in their investigation of the wisdom of public health policy. Equating this to the "yeling fire in a crowded theater" case is silly.

You could use this exact argument form to argue that there are limits to your “right to life” as well.

After all, there are laws that have existed to limit that right for hundreds of years. The death penalty.

My point is that just because there have been laws in the past, that changes nothing about if something should be a right or not.

Academics have warned that their faculties get more ideological and contrarian views are suppressed, people begin to self-censor. There is certainly a very real threat to freedom of expression, opinion, speech or whatever you want to call it. I think in exchange we should recognize this a well.

That is of course also fundamentally contrary to your lapdog characterization.

I’ll be voting for anyone that advocates civil liberties.

Another thing that is not talked about enough is how small minority of people in Silicon Valley gets to dictate how the rest of the world sees information. Algorithms and things that Big Tech is doing behind the closed doors to influence the world. It doesn’t matter left or right, what matters is the unbelievable power of say 1000 people in SV that figured out content engagement algorithms at Google, Twitter, FB, Apple News, etc.

The most powerful people on earth are those that govern algorithms that preferentially show content to people. In China that’s their Big Tech fused with CCP, in the west it is SV Big Tech shunning anything that’s not woke. FB is an exception but even within FB there is a rout.

  > small minority of people in Silicon Valley gets to dictate how the rest of the world sees information

if you think that minority is confined to silicon valley and "big tech" i think you'll be in for a rude awakening, but in this case youtube removing anti-vax videos when its obvious disinformation is a good thing imo

The government has not stepped up to host a social media site that would be bound by the constitution

I’m not sure if this is true. I think there has always been restrictions to free speech, it’s just what’s not allowed has changed over the years. Try having pro Soviet material in the 70s.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "pro Soviet material" but Academia and adjacent fields were full of USSR sympathizers in the 70s. People like Marcuse were/are very influential figures.

One could say the current socialist state of academia got it's start in the 70s.

Marcuse was a communist but not pro-Soviet by most measures.

Academia did indeed have quite a few Soviet sympathetic figure. Tbh, I'm not sure why the gp picked the 70's. The cold war was mostly thawing then as the failure of the USSR was becoming visible (though Reagan partly reignited it in 80s). The 1950s was a period where real and suspected sympathizers of the USSR were drummed out of their positions in academia, entertainment and elsewhere. The witch hunts died down in the 1960s as US society relaxed a bit itself.

We need to start applying free speech to internet platforms as well -- an updated first amendment. Times have changed and these platforms can deny speech, effectively silencing political opposition. The people cheering it on are happy because their political opponents are being silenced. But imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. If you're a coward, you won't speak out against it. You'd rather relish your opponents getting deplatformed.

How does this apply to the rest of the world?

Anti-vax and ant-mask conspiracy theories aren't legitimate political opposition being deplatformed. They're dangerously false views making a pandemic worse. It doesn't matter who spreads them.

What has 'social media' got to do with free speech? Who is stopping you saying what you want? If what you mean is that what write or say is not beamed on everyone's phone, that is not a free speech issue, it's that you can't persuade anyone to publish what you say, which is totally different.

>Society in general has been making chilling moves away from free speech

Private companies in the US have always had the right to refuse a customer anytime, for any reason. No shirt, no shoes, no service. Should a social media company be treated differently?

Because they're monopolies.

>Because they're monopolies

McDonalds has more than 10X the revenue of its closest competitor (KFC). Should they be prohibited from kicking out a customer who is causing a nuisance?

Ironically, because there is more than one entity in social media, they aren't monopolies.

Massive social media platforms are blurring the lines of what public communication means in context of the public square.

We need careful consideration on both sides, and it's disingenuous to pretend that they're simply a private business and that we can treat them as if they aren't effectively virtual public squares that dwarf anything in the real world in scale and reach.

>it's disingenuous to pretend that they're simply a private business and that we can treat them as if they aren't effectively virtual public squares

Recognized public squares (eg the National Mall) are protected by regulation. Is that really what people want for Youtube?

I would settle for a breakup of the tech monopolies. In the absence of market competition regulation is required.

> It's not the wackos we should be worrying about.

It's really amazing to me how easily the "left" was able to be tricked in the same death of critical thinking as the "right".

The "stick to the libs!" angle is far more responsible for the rise in support of Trump leading up to the election. People on the "right" were manipulated for decades into reducing their political beliefs to defending themselves from a fictitious adversary (this is why I put quotes around these terms). If you listen to any radical Trump supporter you'll quickly see that a large part of their logic is based on a deeply held belief that roughly half the country is mind washed, irrational liberals that seek to destroy their way of life.

This rewriting of people skeptical of the vaccines as "wackos" serves the same purpose for the "left" and mainstream progressives have gobbled it up without hesitation. They now see roughly half the country as a bunch mind washed, irrational "wackos" that are a threat to the foundations of our society.

Both the "left" and "right" (terms which honestly don't make any political sense any more, evidence by exactly this irrational support for corporate suppression of voices on the "left" and it's dissent on the "right") are currently structured so that any real, meaningful political discourse about the future of the country is dissolved into two insane groups of people throwing rocks at each other.

If you find yourself defined by either of these major narratives, then you are being played.

What angle about vaccine skepticism isn't summarized as "it might negatively impact you so maybe don't get it".

The vaccine is totally the tragedy of the commons. If everybody gets it you are just making your life worse by also getting it.

If nobody gets it it is bad for everybody.

The reality is sometimes everybody collectively deciding to take one for the team is exactly what we need. Vaccination is one of those situations.

There are exceptions, I don't mean to imply otherwise, but those are not what is being talked about.

"Maybe we shouldn't vaccinate those who have been infected to vaccinate someone else" is being used to justify those who were presumed infected to not get vaccinated. The nuance is getting lost in a painful way.

I don't think that's a complete characterization of the anti-vaccine "movement" or "meme." It's also rooted in distrust of the government science institutions. For instance, many people are taking ivermectin at some risk to themselves, since prolonged human consumption of ivermectin may have adverse effects.

You're sketching a number of false equivalences. Left-of-center-in-the-US and Right-of-center-in-the-US each have their problems but that's bad argument for those being the same problems.

I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to say a substantial portion of anti-vaccine arguments have come from profit-driven fraud. That's pretty well document. That was the point of origin of the original study and various fraudsters have ridden that 'till today. Of course, there are those with nuance positions on the vaccines this will hurt them and hurt informed. Oppositely, the liars have effectively killed many people at this point.

There are a few actual fraudsters on the left but most active health-craze fraud is concentrated on the right in New Age circles (which can generally no longer be considered left).

Which is to say, the left-of-center has a number of problem (absurdist moralistic posturing, say) but straight-up-lying isn't equally divided here, among the politically respectable, it's concentrated on the right.

Thank you for presenting the nuance.

It’s easy to condemn the quacks and extremely ill informed, but all sorts of opinions get swept away. Skeptics, those who want to study the details, exceptions, oddities, etc., get swept up by the system thus stifling legitimate debate and learning of a critical topic.

Covid is a serious disease, there is denying of that. But information control of this kind is far more insidious and overtakes Covid here by a few steps in my opinion.

There is a loud advertising crowd that is transparently motivated to stick it to some deniers that will welcome this and I think they put pressure on Youtube. In some form they deserve each other.

I think this behavior is just as resistant to learning, not hat I think that this measure will even net you one more vaccinated person or that it will change any position. So this only incurs huge cost without benefit.

The stifling seems to be by design, or at the very least it's being considered acceptable collateral damage. Our modern censorship infrastructure does not see minority voices as legitimate.

That infrastructure may not even be capable (as evidenced here) of allowing for minority voices or any form of nuanced dissent, because it has been outsourced to a combination of incompetent "AI" (or dumb algorithms) as well as underpaid, understaffed, undertrained humans.

We are reaping the benefits of tech companies prioritisation of "scale" above all else.

> People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform. It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

My opinion is that we didn't need YouTube/Facebook to conduct public policy debate before, and we don't need it now. It has brought nothing to the table except the, as you put it, "wackos". I really challenge the idea that there is value to them at all in the public debate.

Take this example you gave (by the way I agree that the doctor in question was doing good work). This doctor, 20 years ago, had direct influence in his own practice, some influence in his hospital, and maybe some influence in the health agency, although that is mostly reserved to the politically connected "big doctors" who sit at the top.

What is his influence to enact public policy change today? The exact same as it was then. He's no closer to personally convince his health agency or Hospital administration than he was 20 years ago. The difference is that now he has direct influence over millions of people, outside of any nuanced structure or supervision.

We may argue this isn't great, or democratic, that is true. But it is also true that YouTube videos and Facebook commenters have contributed nothing of value to public health debate. No single life was saved because of YouTube, except for videos where people were urged to see a "real doctor" and not follow Internet advice.

---

As a more general note, I always find the idea that YouTube/Facebook are free speech enablers disturbing. They are companies, they have nothing to do with rights. We have to perform a simple test: If YouTube went bankrupt tomorrow and had to close doors, would someone's right to Free Speech be diminished? They would suddenly not be able to reach as many people, but they'd still hold the exact same rights.

I would say the distinction here is allowing some parties "direct influence over millions of people" and not others. As other commenters have pointed out, it feels like the decision on who gets access to the "virtual town square" is a small, un-elected, and limited-accountability group.

I do agree with your final point-- if social media went dark tomorrow, no ones rights would be diminished. But if it went dark for only certain people, I think we would agree that -something- is being diminished (even if it's not necessarily a right or that it's in the best interest of everyone).

I fully believe that this is a topic where people get to land differently, and I respect those that do their mental calculus differently. There's so many second-order and third-order effects when it comes to speech, and then you amplify it to global-level... there's no great, clean answer. But ultimately, we get to choose what we weigh as most important-- as I've heard others on HN say, "If we wrap ourselves around every conceivable axle then nothing will be achieved."

I agree with you it's a hard topic. I consider myself jaded. I'm not even old and am starting to think the "olden days" (20 years ago) were simpler and saner. My perspective is of someone who is completely disillusioned with all of it. I don't think Social Media can have a net-positive impact in the world at all, even if I use it and find many good parts in it. The ugly bits will always outweigh the positive.

We have to ask ourselves: what are these new tools and inventions being used for? Are we better off today, where everyone has access to this virtual square, or 30 years ago where no one really had a place to say what were on their minds? I think it's clear, with respect to COVID-19, we're much worse off since the tools like YouTube and Facebook are being used to worsen the epidemic, not make it better.

Obviously it can have a good impact. I use YouTube everyday to educate myself on multiple topics (mainly history, computer science, architecture -- non-contentious things). I love that aspect of it, I have more access to knowledge now than I ever thought possible. But in order to limit YouTube to that it'll have to be heavily regulated and stripped down. Which raises the questions of free speech.

Still, I think we may find in a few decades that things like Facebook/Twitter/Youtube were better off left uninvented, never to have seen the light of day, like VX gas and nuclear bombs.

I wonder if the thing that should be uninvented is the profit motive for political speech. Why do people have to be paid to share their political opinions? We could still have Youtube and people saying whatever they like, but in a way that neither Youtube nor the creator is financially rewarded for popularity. Somehow. Of course that applies to traditional media too which is divisive because its profitable.

One of the reasons we find ourselves even in such a predicament is so odd: while governments the world over were (and are) quite willing to put very strong curbs, shut-downs etc. in place, they are hesitant to generally mandate vaccination. So now we are in these proxy campaigns on vaccinations.

Of course, one could argue that governments should not/cannot mandate vaccination, but then we also generally accept that governments can send you off to die in wars. Generally speaking, this whole mess actually brings some much deeper issues on state vs the individual to the surface. Those are the ones that will eventually need proper debate much more than finer points on immunology.

Indeed. I rationalized it so: COVID is a wild enemy that will do whatever to survive at our own expense. We need to fight and wage all-out war, conscript, treat the wounded and comfort the widowed.

The problem is unchecked propaganda could push you to make these same conclusions about anything and anyone.

Yes, the slippery slope argument. Anything can be “unchecked propaganda”, you need to prove it is 1. Propaganda and 2. that it is unchecked

So is every illness, potentially, and yet the world never cared before.

Yes, like every infectious disease with a high mortality rate and capable of overwhelming our healthcare infrastructure. And no, the world of professionals do care, as always. You’re talking about yourself

That is not rational at all. It's a manageable disease class with limited health impact on population, in death numbers comparable to strokes. It is not appropriate to compare it to war at all; in most places people are not afraid of COVID much.

It’s only manageable with heavy handed medical care and heavy handed containment to preserve care capacity. Have you been living under a rock or are you just trotting out talking points? Let me ask: how many deaths in the USA alone? How does it compare to KIAs in one of the many US wars? Please stop pretending you know what you’re talking about

Let's get some perspective on U.S. deaths in 2020 [1]:

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234

For the whole year 2020, heart disease was 2x bigger killer (700 thousand) than COVID (350 thousand). Cancer was bigger killer still than COVID. Stroke was smaller than COVID - I was wrong about that.

COVID gets scary in the few months when it gets out of control, like in January [2]. Those trips are a reason to use some extraordinary measures to prevent next ones.

[2] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-continues...

Long term, COVID is a smaller killer than the other killers in the U.S.

It would look like this: people get dragged out of their houses by armed men, and are forcibly injected while screaming and being held down. "We also send people off to war" is not a sufficient argument for removing the right to bodily autonomy.

Edit: oh, and probably you wouldn't get to see any videos of it online, because it's anti-vaccination content. Haha.

May point was: you already have only a limited right to bodily autonomy.

But that aside: I think pushing people in some (oblique) ways towards vaccination while at the other hand not mandating it sends a somewhat confused message.

yet we force our children to be vaccinated in school in order to be part of society.

we also force other things that impinge on personal liberty, such as wearing seatbelts, getting car (and medical) insurance, etc.

I can see the argument that this is a slippery slope, such as "well, the common good dictates that I get this neuro implant to ward off the 2157 neurovirus", and unfortunately, the short answer is "it depends on the context".

Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality.

as with war measures or other emergency measures, personal liberty has historically been set aside for the common good. I don't see this going away, nor should it.

The conversation should be how to draw the right balance, so that, when the emergency is over, we return to some modicum of personal liberty, while still preserving the common good.

In some cases, it means that the mandate becomes the accepted practice (e.g., child vaccinations). In others, we would hope, personal liberty returns (e.g., habeas corpus).

TL;DR: it is contextual, rather than dogmatic and a-priori

>Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality.

Is this even true anymore? Delta is highly contagious and the vaccines are leaky, thus it is not obvious that the effective R0 of Delta will be less than one assuming a fully vaccinated population. We already know that vaccinated people can still be infected, and not at minuscule rates, and once infected they are similarly contagious as an unvaccinated person. If Delta is endemic now, blaming the unvaccinated for the ongoing pandemic is just false.

It’s not true, because I know people with children under 5 who are prepared to socially isolate until their kids are able to get the vaccine because they believe you have a >50% chance of hospitalization due to COVID.

Some people are playing the long game and blaming vaccine holdouts, which in cases like this is irrational (but who said people are rational).

> yet we force our children to be vaccinated in school in order to be part of society.

It's important to note that this isn't some worldwide, universal practice. Many countries, such as the UK, do not have vaccine mandates to enter their school system. There are also different rules in different U.S. states. It's also quite unfair to compare vaccines that have 1-3 doses to essentially vaccinate children for a lifetime against horrible and deadly diseases to a vaccine that needs endless boosters for a disease which presents very little risk for children or immune adults. My child isn't required to get an annual flu shot to go to school and I don't see how this is much different.

So I agree it is contextual and I think this is the proper context.

Also, all of these vaccines that ARE mandated for children against said horrible and deadly diseases were tested for YEARS prior to becoming mandatory to ensure that they are safe for children.

It is impossible to have that dataset for the COVID vaccines. The time has not elapsed yet. The trials have not been done. They are rushing to approve them in a sense of emergency, which I do understand. I do also acknowledge that the data so far is promising! I certainly hope that the vaccines are safe for children and that we can use these going forward in the future.

But I want the process followed; the full 3-5 year trial test before these are mandated. The emergency push for this towards children would be different if COVID was killing the same % of children that it kills the very old. But the data is overwhelming clear the world over: children do not die from COVID; well over 99% have no deaths or long term issues.

>Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality.

I think the challenge here is the media and the government are heavily promoting the MESSAGE that vaccine holdouts are screwing things up for everyone.

But the truth is that they are not. The unvaccinated are unvaccinated at their own choice. If they die from not being vaccinated, that's their problem.

I'm open to having triage laws at a hospital where, if they are overwhelmed with the unvaccinated, they can be sidelined for others coming in with other needs. The unvaccinated do have this strain on the medical system and it cannot be ignored. As many have said, the DEATHS from Delta and most of the hospitalized CASES from Delta are indeed among the unvaccinated.

But I think the right to chose is worth the cost.

Delta is also spreading around among the vaccinated. It is indeed true that Delta cases for the vaccinated are far more mild. Almost none result in hospitalization, never mind in death.

But Delta is endemic, vaccinated or not. For the first year of this virus, there NEVER was the assumption we could eradicate it entirely. It's a Coronavirus like the common cold; it WILL be endemic. There never was any other outcome once it passed into the millions of cases world wide.

The left's fantasy of authoritarian control and creating a perfect world from harm is simply unobtainable.

The common good is to learn to deal with this, as we do the flu. Reopen, learn, make the choices you think are best and deal with the consequences. This nanny state of lockdown to try to achieve the impossible is stupid, and turning tyrannical in it's pursuit of a utopia that cannot be had.

You're talking about rights versus privileges.

It's a privilege to drive, not a right, thus it's reasonable that there are conditions around that.

You do have a right to an education but, at least in my state, you can completely exempt your child from vaccines and still send them to public school. But even if you don't, you have the right to educate your child in other ways (i.e. home school).

>yet we force our children to be vaccinated in school in order to be part of society.

Here's what's different: mandating it for everything else. It seems disingenuous to treat the documentation/mandate requirements between countries, public schools, and your local pub as equivalent.

>e also force other things that impinge on personal liberty, such as wearing seatbelts, getting car (and medical) insurance, etc.

"we do it for these other things" is something that sounds like an argument, but actually isn't. Does it make sense for this scenario, with this virus, at this point into the pandemic, and with these tradeoffs? If anything, saying "you've lost liberty elsewhere" is an argument for fighting tooth and nail for the bits that remain.

>the short answer is "it depends on the context".

I think you nailed the crux of the problem and the disconnect between people.

"The context" is wildly different depending on your disposition. For a large swath of the population, the 'context' is that COVID is not an existential threat which warrants the suspension of liberty. For others, the 'context' is that COVID represents such a threat to public health that personal liberty can be traded away.

We're doomed to fight, because each side finds the other reprehensible, and one side is trying to take away the liberty of the other.

>Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality.

This is categorically false. The unvaxxed aren't the ones preventing you from doing anything. They don't have the power to do so! The government is holding us all hostage and continuously shifting the goal post. Right now, it has been moved to the unvaxxed. Just as before it was about the curve, then controlling case numbers, then acquiring the vax, then reaching minimum vax numbers, now blaming all woes on those unvaxxed. If we look at Australia, maybe we can predict where the post will move next.

>The conversation should be how to draw the right balance, so that, when the emergency is over, we return to some modicum of personal liberty, while still preserving the common good.

For it to actually be a conversation, you have to accept that there are people with a different world view from you, and that they're not wrong, nor an enemy which is holding society hostage. Presumably everyone on this site can read a graph. We looked at the same data and came to different conclusions.

replying to this comment, even though actually applies to multiple replies to my parent comment.

> This is categorically false. The unvaxxed aren't the ones preventing you from doing anything. They don't have the power to do so!

That itself is categorically false. unvaxxed folks provide a tremendous wealth of externalities, such as undue burden on the healthcare system, behavioral and legal changes that require masking due to lack of critical mass in vaccinations, etc.

But, to get to the crux of your arguments:

you do have the personal liberty to not vaccinate. That is not being taken away from you.

However, you do not have the privilege of making it a protected class (which is really what you are talking about).

If you choose not to be vaccinated, you can: - home school your children - self-employ and self-insure - self-medicate and avoid the healthcare system entirely etc..

Now, none of this is practical in reality, but never at any point is your choice to remain unvaccinated impinged upon.

You simply don't have as many career or social options as you would like, equivalent to being unvaccinated as a protected class.

And that is a horrendous idea (i.e., being a protected class). You can't have it both way... personal liberty often comes as great personal cost. If you truly walk the walk, then be prepared to pay the cost.

>That itself is categorically false. unvaxxed folks provide a tremendous wealth of externalities, such as undue burden on the healthcare system, behavioral and legal changes that require masking due to lack of critical mass in vaccinations, etc.

Again, it's not the unvaxxed doing that to you. That's who you're currently being told is what's preventing you from returning to normal. And again, the last last 18months have been an ever shifting goal post of "if group X would do then..." or "if we had just done Y then..." and yet here we are. Too bad HN doesn't have RemindMe!, as we could check back in a few months post mandate to see what dastardly group/cause/issue is the problem this time.

Those "tremendous wealth of externalities"? That's called living in a society. There's no getting around it. Lots of negative, bad individual choices/actions have Nth order effects on everyone else. Americans specifically make a lot of very, very bad choices over the course of decades that causes "undue burden on the healthcare system" (pick you fav from the CDC's health report). Just because they're not as visible and 1st order as COVID doesn't mean they're not there and a massive portion of the hospital's load.

>you do have the personal liberty to not vaccinate. That is not being taken away from you. >never at any point is your choice to remain unvaccinated impinged upon.

Ok. Honestly, I don't know where people come from with this argument. "You don't have to, we'll just remove your ability to work, feed yourself, and pay for housing until you comply." These sorts of things are generally challenged because in practice, it's a de facto mandate/ban/whatever. "You're free to choose size of the whip," where previously there was no beating involved, is not actually that great of a deal.

I don't think we're going to agree here, and that's fine.

There is one interesting outcome of this discussion, though:

Given our discussion, one of us has to bite the bullet on a particular point:

Artifact A: > Those "tremendous wealth of externalities"? That's called living in a society. There's no getting around it.

Artifact B: >These sorts of things are generally challenged because in practice, it's a de facto mandate/ban/whatever. "You're free to choose size of the whip,"...

I will bite the bullet, and accept that unvaccinated people are not directly causing me harm (unless, for example, one punches me in the face). I will wave my hands and accept the externalities as simply "living in society", (even though, as societal beings, unvaccinated folks do have a significant detrimental effect...)

Accepting, for the sake of argument, that personal responsibility ends at what the individual does (rather than any 2nd to n-order effects, i.e., "externalities"), then it also means that the argument "in practice, it's a de facto mandate/ban/whatever." doesn't hold, since no one individual is holding a syringe up to you and forcing you to take it.

again, can't have it both ways.

Thus, if we accept that we are societal beings, and externalities matter (e.g., 2nd to n-order effects), then my right to swing my fist ends at your face, and vice versa, directly and to a tolerable n-th degree.

Just as an employer can choose not to hire you for toxic behavior or any numerous reasons (particularly at at-will states), the only thing they cannot use as a factor is anything that makes you a protected class.

You are effectively proposing that the choice to be unvaccinated should be a protected class.

That is what I disagree with. There is no justification to make it a protected class.

Arguably; drafts do look like that. I mean, I can't say how many people scream while being dragged off to fight in a war, but the concept is very similar.

There hasn't been a draft in most of our lifetimes. There also hasn't been a virus as deadly as this one.

So, maybe the better frame of reference would be: nationally mandatory vaccinations can be alright and make sense, under the same argument that allows the draft to be alright and make sense; we just need some quantitative framework under which it can be instituted.

For example: if covid becomes endemic (which seems to be likely), and we institute mandatory vaccinations for it during this phase of the pandemic, pre-endemic; the argument for mandatory vaccinations may make sense today, given the level of infections and deaths that are occurring, but will "mandatory boosters" make sense in three years when the level of deaths is (hopefully) far lower and more in-line with the seasonal flu?

The critical difference between a draft and mandatory vaccinations is: most people understand the general need for, but also hate the implementation of, the draft. Its a duty; its not desirable. In a democracy, this, alongside the massive cost and logistics effort of maintaining such a large army, acts as a very natural counter-balance to the impetus for people in power to abuse it.

Vaccines do not have such a counterbalance. They're very cheap per-shot, relative to the draft. The logistics are already in place and have successfully operated at scale. And, most concerning; many people want mandatory vaccination. No one should want it. Its an ugly necessity, but far too many people don't see the ugliness.

If you're reading this and need help to see the ugliness: Our government experiences corruption, like any government. Moderna's stock value has gone up by ~2,000% since the beginning of the pandemic. This, alone, is an obscenely powerful bias for people in key positions of power to push for more vaccination, irrespective of their need or efficacy; for example, maybe you assemble a panel of experts, who tell you vaccine boosters aren't necessary, then overrule the panel and say they're necessary anyway [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/world/covid-boosters-vacc...

This last point and the new york times article are a great example of this corruption and corporate interests.

The bastards at the helm CANNOT be trusted.

It is, if nothing else, hopefully proof to anyone with eyes that the Left is just as susceptible as the Right to turning something which should mostly be a medical decision, into a political one. Let alone the possibility that it could be corruption (which I feel is unlikely, but not impossible).

Much ire was thrown at Trump during his Presidency for filling many government positions with Yes-men who would blindly fall in line with the party.

Now, we have Biden's White House ranting non-stop about Boosters, a significant amount of concern that the Federal government, as a whole, has no unified message on whether boosters are even necessary and who they're necessary for, a CDC panel saying they're not necessary, and the head of the CDC falling in line with the Biden White House against medical advice. Its awfully similar to what Trump was lambasted for.

Ultimately the position I fall back on is: These decisions are medical decisions. Politics (and, it follows, corruption) need to be removed. When you take issues to the national level, politics and corruption will ABSOLUTELY, undoubtedly, in 100% of instances, be involved, no matter how well-intentioned the cause is. Thus, these issues need to stay out of the federal government, and be handled among the smallest number of people possible. Vaccination, for me and my children, may be something my doctor recommends; it may be something my school system requires; maybe even my workplace and the state has a say. But the discussion inevitably reaches a lower and lower quality as more voices and mandates and requirements are added.

The counter-argument to this is: Vaccination is only strongly effective if we reach some level of herd immunity, so we need federal mandates. Unfortunately, that's irrelevant; we live in a democracy, and if you push against the other side too hard, they push back, your mandate gets repealed, and your yes-men lose their re-election.

Freedom Isn't Free.

> And, most concerning; many people want mandatory vaccination. No one should want it.

The alternative is overflowing hospitals, masks forever and the restrictions on movement. I 100% want those who force this on society to stopped. The last 18 months have already been tremendously ugly. A vaccine mandate is far less so.

I'm not sure if there is really any widespread acceptance in any democratic country that the government can just decide to send anyone to a foreign war. Every western soldier who died in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. volunteered. I think that if the US government just decided to reintroduce conscription back in 2003 it would had went down much worse than when they were sending conscripts to Vietnam and there'd probably be even much more resistance to that these days.

Which country has given up its ability to conscript? Not just chosen not to exercise it. I would call that general acceptance of that policy. In a specific case, whether to exercise on that policy is a more complex choice.

There are many things governments in theory could legally do that would not be generally accepted by the public. I can hardly imagine a realistic scenario under which any western country could deploy conscripts in an overseas war without extreme opposition.

I’m not sure if you are familiar with Stop-loss [1] but it’s been used to some extent in pretty much every conflict over the last 30 years to keep people serving involuntarily.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-loss_policy

I'd assume that at this point anyone signing up is (or should be) aware that the military can arbitrarily extend their service time?

Governments already mandate vaccinations [of kids] in many places. Just not for covid-19.

> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).

If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. If you present that opinion as a fact, then that's misinformation. I don't know what form his "insistence" had, but I've seen plenty of similar cases so far, and all of them have been from people pushing their own narratives, instead of informing people responsibly.

If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".

> It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

Being in a minority does not absolve one of responsibility. If you're publishing your opinion, or if you're discussing your research before it's been peer-reviewed, you have the responsibility to make that clear, and even to point out that it does not agree with the current scientific consensus (if any exists).

never mind that many of the positions that are "scientific consensus" are not supported by the current peer reviewed research.

That's honestly news to me. I thought that "scientific consensus" is supported by peer-reviewed research, by definition. Can you elaborate?

There’s quite a few medical practices which guidelines still recommend that do not show benefit in better or newer trials.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104821

This paper says we should abandon practices when they are shown to not work. I don't think anyone will disagree with that. But the original post made it seem like there were practices which were adopted willy nilly. But this paper just shows the self correcting nature of science.

They had to write a paper saying that because it doesn’t happen. We are still doing these procedures today.

Do the interventional cardiologists want to stop stenting people? Not really. The orthopedic surgeons still want to mess with your meniscus, etc.

I mean... This is the scientific framework. There was a mistake and the mechanism to fix it is to write more papers. I know it's not fixed yet, but that's the procedure. Do you believe this should never have happened? Then I guess we disagree on how powerful human intellect can be.

I think its fine for this to occur, and we should expect it, but how long should it take to reverse a bad practice? Is a decade or more acceptable?

Of course not. Nobody is endorsing for that. The problem is these are hard problems to solve and forming a consensus is a hard problem in addition to it. If we keep flip flopping on every new data point we will have more misses than hits.

Not the parent, but this study seems to be the best RCT of mask effectiveness so far (N=350,000):

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...

Cloth masks showed no statistically significant reduction in the spread of Covid-19. (surgical masks - different story)

Yet I'm still surrounded by people - wearing predominantly cloth masks - that are full of outrage for the maskless. I've not heard any updates from the CDC on this issue.

This is not true. The study found a reduction in COVID-19 symptoms for the cloth mask group. They also found a reduction in seroprevalence for the cloth mask group, but that reduction wasn't statistically significant. "Statistically insignificant" is not the same as "not true". It is very hard to sufficiently power a seroprevalence study.

This is a high-power study with N in the hundreds of thousands.

"Statistically insignificant" is the same as "no reason to believe it is true".

This is really interesting, and I’d like to read the paper - do you have a link?

EDIT: here: https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-...

That summary is really hard to draw conclusions from;

“However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.”

And “ A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.”

But also “ Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.”

I suppose it means there was a difference but it was not statistically significant. Like 5% reduction with 10% certainty.

> Cloth masks showed no statistically significant reduction in the spread of Covid-19.

This is a completely false characterization of the article you just linked.

There were significantly fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with surgical masks compared with the control villages. (Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.) This aligns with lab tests showing that surgical masks have better filtration than cloth masks. However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.

“Unfortunately, much of the conversation around masking in the United States is not evidence-based,” Luby said. “Our study provides strong evidence that mask wearing can interrupt the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. It also suggests that filtration efficiency is important. This includes the fit of the mask as well as the materials from which it is made. A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.”

Emphasizing this quote:

However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.

From the original paper:

--- We find clear evidence that surgical masks lead to a relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence of 11.2% (aPR = 0.89 [0.78,1.00]; control prevalence = 0.80%; treatment prevalence = 0.71%). For cloth masks, we find an imprecise zero, although the confidence interval includes the point estimate for surgical masks (aPR = 0.95 [0.79,1.11]; control prevalence 0.67%; treatment prevalence 0.62%). ---

If you go to the chart, you find a 5% relative reduction with a p-value of 0.540 (!)

Regarding reduction in symptoms:

--- Additionally, when we look separately by cloth and surgical masks, we find that the intervention led to a reduction in COVID-like symptoms under either mask type (p = 0.000 for surgical, p = 0.048 for cloth), but the effect size in surgical mask villages was 30-80% larger depending on the specification. In Table A10, we run the same specifications using the smaller sample used in our symptomatic seroprevalence regression (i.e. those who consented to give blood). In this sample we continue to find an effect overall and an effect for surgical masks, but see no effect for cloth masks. ---

There's no intellectually honest way to interpret this data other than "cloth masks have very little effect, if any".

It's a sad sign of the times that "scientific consensus" doesn't sound crazy anymore. It was scientific consensus that the Catholic church based on to sentence Galileo. He was a lone dissenting voice. A bit of history for you. And this is besides the fact that true scientists have never sought consensus/peer-review. I'll stand by as you come up with non-modern, paper-churning, publish-or-perish examples of great scientists famous (or great) for work or theory that was accepted by means of consensus.

There's no Catholic Church prosecuting those who defy the official scientific position today. Galileo was not a lone dissenting voice - he was a proponent of Copernicanism, which he overstated the accuracy of his evidence for, feuding with the Church about whether he was overstating, and getting himself in terrible trouble with the Church. Once Kepler's models were confirmed with observations after Galileo with better telescopes the Church accepted. Later Enlightenment thinkers built a martyr myth around Galileo, and today the nature of his conflict with the Church is an ahistorical picture painted by later hagiographies of Galileo

This is a story that does not apply to our times. There've been many regular scientific revolutions even in the last few decades, the Church hasn't persecuted scientists, and the modern scientific consensus has followed with the revolutions. Whether it's the matter of the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, the revolutions in molecular biology, revolutions in astronomy, or other areas where advances are regular, those outliers actually advancing science have only briefly been ahead of consensus in the real world, but most outliers are cranks, and only those with an expert training in a discipline are likely to be able to identify real advances over crank science. The Galileo model of believing outliers virtually always leaves you in the wrong unless you are a domain-specific expert on the topic.

Look at using MRNA as a medical treatment as another example of a recent revolution, one that's now available in a safe, effective vaccine form.

Call it the church of Google(Faang?) if you will. They have real power over peoples lives and livelihoods. The church of Faang has a nice ring to it.

Google/FAANG have no real point of control anywhere in the process of how the sciences operate. Scientists publish in journals, while social media, search, et al. are handy but not something that guides their research or their consensus.

The real gatekeeping comes in what research gets grants and funding, but if you look into what's happening there, it's not comparable to the Church proscribing things - it mostly means that the DoD, petrochem, and a few industries have outsized influence on what research is done.

I'll try to answer in two parts. First you seem to have missed the point that (1) the Church was no (or rather accidental) arbiter of science—they largely deferred to the prevailing consensus. Thus in the conflict with Galileo, they were upholding a status quo which itself was upheld on the foundation of "many scientists believe that …" ie scientific consensus. You have a point if you say that Galileo wasn't a lone dissenting voice but then you'd have to explain what it was exactly that silenced Rene Descartes from publishing (as he confessed). He self-censored out of fear of contradicting the Church's position. If you bear in mind that the Church conducted no scientific experiments, Descartes essentially wasn't comfortable going up against the consensus.

The Church did hold the consensus opinion, and accepted the minority opinion, Copernicanism, as a hypothesis. At that time, the epicycic systems made better predictions than Heliocentrism with round orbits. Kepler's later elliptical models did fit and won out after Galileo's day. Also, while Galileo presented some compelling evidence from astronomical observations, he was the only one able to make them, which made his claims difficult to confirm. He stated that Copernicanism was not a hypothesis, the Church tried to get him to walk that back, but Galileo bitterly feuded with an initially sympathetic, but ultimately hostile Pope Urban VIII enough to get himself in trouble. He was persecuted for defying the pope, the science was only a proximate cause to the root cause of his problem which was that he was rude to the pope.

That points to a bad system, but one that has nothing to do with the modern world we live in, and which if applied by analogy will fit so poorly as to be a bad analogy.

Also the Church conducted scientific experiments regularly, since a number of priests through the ages were scientists, and it was a result of priests taking observations in later, better telescopes that updated the Church's position on heliocentrism.

We don't disagree on all the factors leading up to Galileo's prosecution. But we should be careful judging why he was rude to the establishment. AFAIK it had all to do with the orthodoxy, not personal ongoing grudge. It's the same visceral rejection we have for obviously wrong/broken processes. The papacy around this time was in the throes of more urgent & existential problems, and so reaching for the huge mallet to kill Galileo once and for all made the most sense. Scientific consensus was that hammer.

That aside, individual priest carried out their experiments, not in the name of the Church. The Church had already leaned towards scholarship by this time (post-Bologna) and being the dominant component of all European cultures, it only made sense that it would attract people with interests in science and experiments. (By the time we had scientist-priests people didn't know why they were Christians, to begin with.) This is discounting roles in Church or its bodies—usually monasteries—that required a vow to dumbness.

> By the time we had scientist-priests people didn't know why they were Christians, to begin with.

What do you mean?

Christianity had become culture.

You mean ubiquitous? So? That's a non-sequitur.

I don't mean ubiquitous. I know what ubiquitous means. Latin wasn't ubiquitous in Rome. A thing of culture isn't ubiquitous. If anything it was transparent. Perhaps you should read about the era under observation before attempting to summarise/reinterpret?

Perhaps you should attempt to substantiate your nonsensical claim?

Perhaps you need a dictionary?

I don't. Perhaps you do? Are you unable to substantiate your nonsensical claim?

On scientific consensus delivering the goods, here you seem to have it backwards (or our experiences of how science is conducted differs fundamentally). To my knowledge, one person and one experiment (usually, except where the product is purely mathematical) is enough to propose a new theory (but also to refute an existing one). If a debunked theory was supported by scientific consensus (ie theory wasn't standing on its own), what happens to the consensus it merited? and the so-called scientists who "voted?" Or perhaps the scientific consensus was just paperweight?

Scientific consensus provides a means for bad science/scientists to escape ostracism (I use this with the full intensity of its definitions). Because it provides a thick and opaque veil behind which the clergy (all scientists) instructs the laity (the rest of us). Individual scientists no longer stand and fall on their own. So call them cranks if you want but the individuals standing on the banks of the "scientific consensus" stream are arguably the closest we have to 16th and 17th century scientists tinkering away in their private labs, making discoveries that continue to bear their names.

Now, to a philosophy of science I subscribe to: Popper's Falsifiability Test. An undercurrent (probably prominent, even) theme is this: new confirmatory experiments add nothing new if they don't deviate materially from the original experiment. Following this, the whole enterprise of scientific consensus stands on shaky grounds since it adds nothing. It transforms science into a faith-based exercise (akin to bishops at a synod throwing their weights behind certain theories and declaring other bishops as cranks/heretics). This I do not accept.

>To my knowledge, one person and one experiment (usually, except where the product is purely mathematical) is enough to propose a new theory (but also to refute an existing one).

To my knowledge theories proposed that way in modern science aren't taken seriously and in our present time are not the norm for any recent major scientific discoveries or research. Those days are long past. New science is done in expensive labs with very expensive equipment and gets funded by grants. The Alvarez Hypothesis was possible because of cutting edge nuclear science that could identify the iridium. LIGO, and every space science and astronomical discovery are driven by really expensive ever growing scopes. In astronomy, chem, physics, molecular biology, paleontology, et al today you'll need an expensive lab and very large grants to do cutting edge work. At this point we're building colliders many kilometers in length. Modern Science is a product of well funded labs with staffing and equipment funded largely by research grants. There are cases in domains like macrobiology where individuals could do field work and find a new species, but the domains where the individual scientist is doing meaningful work are dwindling to none, and you should update your model of how modern science actually operates and is funded, it's interesting.

This isn't an argument in favor of scientific consensus. There's no straight path between expensive, collaborative research/science and scientific consensus. If anything the units of science have moved from individuals to teams acting as a body. But this isn't scientific consensus.

A few examples would be nice to understand what you are saying.

I’m not really sure what kind of problems you expect peer review to solve? https://twitter.com/page_eco/status/1441040475826184194?s=21

There’s plenty of bad/fraudulent/wrong stuff that gets through peer review, perhaps even a majority.

I guess, if your statement wasn't researched and peer reviewed, it'll be considered misinformation...

This is a really bad take of a complex situation.

Peer reviewing is hard. Reproducibility is hard.

Neither of these things being hard invalidates the value of peer review compared to gut ideas from random people.

Sure, in an ideal world we’d have some kind of review, but what we have now seems largely ineffective.

Except you are missing a huge huge part of what you linked:

> We conclude that the reviewing process for the 2014 conference was good for identifying poor papers

When it comes to peer review that is the actual goal. Have a filter that prevents bad things from getting published.

In an ideal world we would have a process that allows good papers to be published as well.

However I think we can all agree that is a secondary concern. Especially since pre-publish announcements are common anyway, so it isn't like no one is looking at papers that aren't published.

Good point about the reproducibility crisis. We seem to have forgotten about that.

There is a better alternative to listening to random people I think which is to follow the work of individual scientists whom we trust because we have been following their work over a long period of time and because they exhibit Jacob Bronowski's 'habit of truth'.

Unfortunately, I don't know any immunologists or epidemiologists! I'm guessing that censorship on balance makes it harder rather than easier to find them.

As much as scientists are taking a hard look at their own processes it is important to still lean on what is as close to known as can be.

You don't need to blindly trust science but also don't be blind to it. Assuming everything is false just leads to guts dominating which is unhelpful.

Similarly if there isn't studies done then relying on the ideas put forth by those who are in the field is better than arbitrary people looking for their five minutes of fame.

The peer review problem is "maybe we need to find a way to find good papers in addition to blocking bad ones" and the reproducibility problem is "people tend to focus so much on novel results that we end up effectively p hacking across all the studies we do".

Neither of those is the way it is usually referred to in layman's terms as "science is broken" that is an exaggeration but hey we do live in a world where that is how people talk...

> If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion.

By that standard, this entire website and most of the software industry is misinformation. In fact, most political speech is misinformation.

> If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".

GP is saying that the conversation is, and should be recognized as, more nuanced than that. There sure is an undercurrent of people making narratives but that's not a new problem. The left and right have weaponized narratives to the detriment of this country ad infinitum. If you're arguing we should only have evidence based discussion and that anecdotes and opinions don't matter, then you have new problems. The new problems will alienate and harm anyone that your current telemetry (and understanding) doesn't reflect. To me, that's an age-old problem where some value technocracy while others value bureaucracy; my personal opinion being that both are valuable but they need a distribution model in government that optimizes for problem solving.

> If you're publishing your opinion, or if you're discussing your research before it's been peer-reviewed, you have the responsibility to make that clear, and even to point out that it does not agree with the current scientific consensus (if any exists).

I agree, but it seems GP was indicating this doctor was doing just that and was still silenced.

> By that standard, this entire website and most of the software industry is misinformation. In fact, most political speech is misinformation.

No, by that standard, this entire website is offering its oppinion. Which in fact it is.

> In fact, most political speech is misinformation.

Now there's an understatement.

Ask liberals or conservatives and they will quickly point out their it's not their side that's misinforming.

The fact is that they are all misinfoming. Just yesterday in the congressional testimoney, Gen Milley, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen McKenzie - all said they informed the president for keeping 2,500 troops in May. President Biden couple of weeks ago denied that he had any recommendation from the generals or anyone in the government.

So which one is true?

> By that standard, this entire website and most of the software industry is misinformation.

Sure, if we ignore the context of my statement and this whole discussion, which happens to be about COVID vaccines.

Also, please note that what I said -- and what you quoted -- is that if your claim is not supported by peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. I didn't say that offering your opinion is the same as spreading misinformation.

It's only when you're presenting your opinion as a fact that you're engaging in misinformation, which is what I said in the next sentence that you didn't quote.

> GP is saying that the conversation is, and should be recognized as, more nuanced than that.

"Having a nuanced discussion" and "being responsible with how you say things" are not mutually exclusive propositions.

> If you're arguing we should only have evidence based discussion and that anecdotes and opinions don't matter, then you have new problems.

Anecdotes and opinions should be clearly presented as such, so that everyone who encounters them can decide how much they matter to them. That's what I'm arguing.

> I agree, but it seems GP was indicating this doctor was doing just that and was still silenced.

I see nothing there that indicates whether the doctor was doing that or not. Like I said, I don't know whether the doctor "insisted" in a way that made it clear it was his opinion, unsupported by current research.

> It's only when you're presenting your opinion as a fact that you're engaging in misinformation

And this sentence is a peer-reviewed fact, or just your opinion that you failed to label appropriately i.e. misinformation?

> I didn't say that offering your opinion is the same as spreading misinformation.

> Anecdotes and opinions should be clearly presented as such, so that everyone who encounters them can decide how much they matter to them. That's what I'm arguing

Agreed. Though, even data driven analysis is best-effort these days and that is a fact that folks like to ignore in these kinds of discussions. If someone has to make abundantly clear that something is anecdotal or opinion based I can agree to that, but I think a counter-weight needs to be assigned to data: explain the potential for gaps and how historically fraught this area of data has been. That arms folks with the information to assign weights themselves.

The same exact argument could be said about the platforms.

What evidence do they have that that there is no chance of complications for certain individuals?

They need to be held to the same standard they are holding their end users.

In the last year social media platforms have suppressed facts and discourse pre-emptively and only months later do we find out that there was truth in the censored content. They can't be the final arbitraters of truth.

> If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion.

Not necessarily. What is the bar to be defined as "scientific research"? What is the bar for "peer review"? Considering the massive amount of evidence that a large amount of "peer review" doesn't review much and that a measurable amount of "scientific research" is inadequate and sometimes outright fraudulent, any pursuit of truth shouldn't be built exclusively on such a weak foundation. But to your point, good research should hold more weight (and does!).

> If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".

And yet concerns about the long-term safety of these vaccines are, by definition, untested. The long term efficacy of these vaccines are certainly in doubt. Both are reasonable concerns worth debating and exploring. But will get classified as "anti-vax" and will become subject to censorship "for our own good".

I am vaccinated. I believe these vaccines represent an astounding accomplishment. I believe people should have access to all information in order to make the best decisions for themselves.

I also have some skepticism regarding the messages and messaging that comes from the CDC and NIH. I also distrust the role they've played in any discussion regarding the origins of Covid.

Why we (in America at least) can watch abject government incompetence in the DoD, FBI, CIA, ICE, IRS, and on and on but pretend the CDC and the NIH, the ultimate gatekeepers of the Covid and vaccine narratives, are immune to such failings is beyond me.

All of this is correct. Many on the left seem forcibly unable to view the nuance described here.

Freedom of choice is an American value that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world to the degree that it does here. Freedom to decide what you do with your body trumps public health. Half of Americans believe this, and the other half doesn't.

Finding the compromise between those two viewpoints is exceptionally challenging. Each group has the temptation to view the other as being "willfully evil," whether for being selfish or for imposing tyranny.

I hope the solution is that our high vaccination rate of 70+% of adults and the prevalence of the spread of Delta (which creates natural immunity) will combine to reach herd immunity and we can get out of this craven, horrible timeline we find ourselves in.

"My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins."

Your freedom to catch and spread covid to me is not supported by established law. It's also why we don't allow smoking in restaurants, etc. And it's also related to seat belt laws. George Washington forced our soldiers to take a smallpox innoculation and it was pivotal to us winning.

In 1905, in Jacobson v Massachusetts, the US Supreme Court upheld the Cambridge, Mass, Board of Health’s authority to require vaccination against smallpox during a smallpox epidemic. It ruled that the public health trumps your ability to freely engage in society if you will endanger it.

You'd like to reach herd immunity, but you didn't offer a solution; instead, you gave a hopeful outcome if we do nothing. We have millions that refuse to vaccinate yet wish to move freely in society. They are clogging hospitals and costing our society an estimated $6B, and climbing. Reaching herd immunity while using your version of freedom means that long covid disabilities and deaths are just an inevitable that we're hopeless to prevent.

> Your freedom to catch and spread covid to me is not supported by established law.

No all freedoms are given by eastablished law, many are implicit. Then later some freedoms can be restricted by the law.

Is there a law banning catching COVID or spreading COVID? I don't think so.

> It's also why we don't allow smoking in restaurants, etc.

Some establishments do allow it. It's your choice, if you want to visit them or not.

> And it's also related to seat belt laws.

It's not.

> George Washington forced our soldiers to take a smallpox innoculation and it was pivotal to us winning.

Yes, soldiers usually submit to wished of their commanders because otherwise their stance in the military deteriorates. Most people do not submit to military organization.

The long-term safety is an angle that sounds reasonable, but isn't, and is used as an anti-vax talking point. A doctor is expected to know better.

First, historically, no vaccine has caused adverse effects beyond about 2 months. Second, millions have been vaccinated for nearly 9 months already. Third, the mRNA vaccine is metabolized in the body and leaves no trace of itself past 11-14 days. Fourth, it is not a daily medication.

A reasonable analogy of drinking a beer and being worried the after effects might hit you a year after the fact, because it's untested, is obviously approaching absurd.

Objections over long term safety are absolutely reasonable due to historical precedent (see the Polio vaccine) and because the litmus test of “peer-reviewed” research is the standard the parent I responded to set. There exists no “long term” research of mRNA vaccines from which to draw conclusions (another reason why the “peer-reviewed science” standard for truth is fundamentally flawed). I don’t think concerns over long-term danger is a strong argument (which is one reason I chose to be vaccinated) but it is absolutely reasonable.

Gell-Mann amnesia strikes again.

In the 19th century, Ignaz Semmelweis claimed that hand washing was a way to improve hygiene and communicable disease. If Google had existed in 1847, his claims would have been censored since they went strongly against the scientific consensus. History is littered with examples like this. Most of us with a STEM education spent years learning about example after example of a great scientist or whistleblower that was scorned by the medical or scientific community, and it turned out that countless lives could have been saved if people had kept a more open mind. I am greatly disappointed in anyone who claims to be educated but thinks that censorship is acceptable in a free society.

> In the 19th century, Ignaz Semmelweis claimed that hand washing was a way to improve hygiene and communicable disease. If Google had existed in 1847, his claims would have been censored since they went strongly against the scientific consensus.

Was there an established practice of peer-reviewed research back in 1847? My understanding is that the scientific community evolved that system because it helps reduce the potential for errors and makes it easier to trust the research.

> Most of us with a STEM education spent years learning about example after example of a great scientist or whistleblower that was scorned by the medical or scientific community, and it turned out that countless lives could have been saved if people had kept a more open mind.

"Open mind" and "communicating responsibly" are not mutually exclusive.

> I am greatly disappointed in anyone who claims to be educated but thinks that censorship is acceptable in a free society.

I am just as disappointed in anyone who thinks that requiring responsible communication is the same as censorship.

> back in 1847

Semmelweis was basically lynched (and ruined) by his peers. As usual.

> responsible communication

Yes but the contextual issue here is that of censorship. Or if you proposed a method to filter general publication through criteria involving responsibility, that would require more details.

Or to take a more recent example, should the media have censored Drs. Marshall and Warren in 1982 when they claimed that the scientific consensus about the cause of stomach ulcers was completely wrong? Everyone thought that ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food, but it turned out to be bacterial infections. We always need to be humble and recognize that some things we believe to be correct will later turn out to be false.

https://badgut.org/information-centre/a-z-digestive-topics/n...

(To be clear I think the current scientific consensus that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective is correct.)

If Google had existed in 1847, and the web for that matter, he would have been able to create and post as many videos espousing his theories on the web. Either through alternative sites, either by setting up 20 sites of his own for pretty much free, or by emailing, messaging or by buying a $50 laser printer and printing 5,000 pamphlets to hand out, and Google would have had zero power to stop him.

There wasn’t scientific consensus that recovery from COVID did not leave antibodies in your system so as to make vaccine unnecessary. It was undecided.

When the different vaccines came out we did not have peer-reviewed studies to show that they were effective, only the smaller studies done by the drug companies that developed them. In much we were accepting the opinions about the effectiveness as facts, as well as the side effects which were yet to be discovered.

We saw the same thing about the effectiveness of cloth mask and anti-bacterial cleaning had on spreading of covid. It took well past the first year before we started to see when, how, where and whom benefited from different strategies, and the meta studies is yet fully clear on the answers to those.

Looking what we don't know as far as today in terms of vaccinations, the biggest unknown variables seems to be about duration. With most nations having gone through two rounds of vaccinations, it seems now that a third one is now needed. One study cited recently was conducted on patients that is undergoing transplantation, with half of the patients missing antibodies while having taken two vaccination already this year. As a result there is a lot of talking about treating covid vaccination as something that will be added to the existing seasonal flue vaccinations that vulnerable groups take, but which the general population do not because of the short window of protection. Time will tell and it won't be anti-vax people that do the research or conduct the discussion.

We usually don't call drug company vaccine studies "peer reviewed" because they are reviewed by health authorities (regulatory agencies), not "peers".

That's actually a higher bar.

>If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research,

That's not how science has worked, especially in this pandemic. Most of what we know about SARS-CoV-2 came to us through biorxiv preprints and posts on forums like virological.org; the added value of peer review has typically been minimal (but often adding 3-12 months of delay in disseminating information). Even the role of peer review as a gate keeper has been wanting, lots of garbage studies about Covid-19 with glaring confounders keep getting published in peer reviewed journals. You could probably find a few hundred trials with systematic age differences between treatment groups that have been published in respectable venues. Some of these studies even contribute significantly to misinformation about the efficacy of sham treatments like hydroxycholoroquine and ivermectin.

There is unfortunately no short-cut to the development of individual scientific literacy, no trusted tier of experts which can safeguard us from misunderstanding and falsehood. We're all more or less on our own.

> If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. If you present that opinion as a fact, then that's misinformation.

Unironically, I would consider your opinion here, to be dangerous mis-information. Yes really.

We do not have to throw out the entire body of past medical work, for every single "new" question that comes up.

So there are absolutely some, scientifically supported, conclusions, that we can come to, about diseases, using this past body of medical work.

If we listened to you it would result in people refusing to do basic things, like wash our hands and socially distance, because we haven't yet completed a full study, for a specific new disease that is going around.

Bingo!

And for people who might contest the "peer review" dimension, it's not so much about having peer reviewed things, it is about clearly disclosing the basis from which you're putting forward a statement you claim to be true.

That said, I'm not doubting that the YouTube mechanisms for suppression of irresponsibly disbursed information and misinformation has a high false positive rate especially when addressing similar topics. And hopefully YouTube can address that over time.

This is my concern as well. How many people refrain from saying anything about Covid at all for fear of triggering some mindless algorithms?

Human review of such blunders is unreliable at best.

Funnily enough, I have exactly this problem with ads on a youtube channel right now. On the Channel, one video mentions Covid in the context of healthcare politics. This results in instant rejection of ads for other videos about other topics. Requesting review of the denial results in confirmation of the denial in about 95% of the cases so far.

The video in question is citing official recommondations, i.e. is pro-vaccination, of course.

Obviously not enough people are shutting up, given the way that antivax content is the #1 propagator on Facebook.

There is money to be made from lying to people. That's why it's being banned. It should have been done last year honestly, but social media companies were afraid to anger Trump. They took the barest actions to add warnings, and no surprise, no one reads them.

I shouldn't need to be "warned" about some wrongthink by a platform that believes they know the world best. It's dystopian as fuck.

It’s not “wrongthink”, it’s actually just factually wrong and people are dying because they believe it anyway.

This isn't question of quantity (not enough) but quality.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.

Agreed shutting down discussion is not helping matters and we appear to be moving in an autocratic dystopian direction as a nation.

The FDA advisory panel was overridden to endorse a booster shot. Even mentioning FDA officials resigning and the board being overridden gets you labeled as anti-vax and blocked.

Future not looking good :/

> People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform.

And if you deplatform wackos, you just create incentive to decry everything as wacko in order to ban it.

The way to combat misinformation is in the free market of ideas and discourse. Not by banning it. That's just might-makes-right.

Problem is that combating misinformation in the free market hasn't been working so well. While I agree this is fine for most things, there are exceptions such as a pandemic or when a powerful political figure can invoke a riot.

People need to get it through their skulls that "tech companies" have _no place_ "moderating" scientific debate.

If you've ever found yourself typing "Should X give Y a platform?" you are part of the problem.

Be better, be a part of the solution.

Scientific debate happens in scientific circles. The results are presented to the media. The public debates it on social media.

> Be better, be a part of the solution.

And what is the solution?

> The results are presented to the media. [The media misrepresents the results to the public, intentionally or unintentionally]. The public debates it on social media.

I filled in the critical missing step. Science journalism is mostly trash.

That still doesn't make public discourse "scientific debate".

Not sure I entirely agree with that either. Scientific debate is evolving with the times. Online isn't a traditional formal venue where these debates happen, but they do happen here too. Scientists discussing actual scientific facts, or disputing each other's claims get silenced too. Seems like a reasonable interpretation of "scientific debate".

And I suspect the OP meant "scientific debate" as the public's discussion of science and the policies that should be formed around the facts as they see them.

It is a matter of consumer protection. We allow a farmer to set up a farm stand and sell tomatoes by the side of the road without much regulation, because consumers in general can determine if the product is good.

We don't allow that farmer to sell auto insurance by the side of the road without regulation. This is because a consumer cannot possibly look at a few documents from the farmer and know the quality and reliability of that auto insurance policy that the farmer is selling.

Things are more complicated with regulating free speech because people approach the speech from very different angles. Maybe I watch a scummy Televangelist because I want to make a new farting preacher video. Maybe an elderly person watches the same video and gives away the money she had for food for the week. How do you balance the religious and free speech rights of the preacher, my right to make fun of him, and the consumer protection of the elderly person?

Frankly, i applaud this censorship. Granted i'm super left/liberal/pro-vax/etc so i'm _definitely_ not in the camp of anti-vaxxers, however we have for years put all our faith and trust in corporations.

Now private entities aren't aligning with a lot of people and they're shocked that corporations aren't the free speech utopia that they once thought. It frustrates me that many of these people didn't care when it was others that were oppressed, but i digress.

Regardless, this sort of mostly harmless but highly sensationalized censorship is very good for our freedoms in my mind because it forces us to decentralize. We've become far too centralized and complacent in unwarranted corporate faith. This is to be expected, and people should have been prepared.

Let Youtube/etc censor all it wants. We need better than Youtube. Wake people up to that. My 2c.

> Now private entities aren't aligning with a lot of people and they're shocked that corporations aren't the free speech utopia that they once thought.

I've worked at some of these companies so I can give you an insider perspective, because what you're saying isn't an accurate reflection of history. Maybe the internet wasn't a "Utopia" but compared to what it is now it certainly was.

In the tech community 5-10 years ago, all of us working for these larger platforms used to pride ourselves upholding free speech as a core value. At that time the only content banned were threats, copyright violations, child pornography, etc. Only after the 2016 election rolled around did everything change. The problem is that it's an incredibly slippery slope and once you start compromising your moral compass for "the right reasons", it quickly snowballs into something much worse than anticipated.

I agree but even 5-10 years ago - putting faith in a company being omnipotent is no different than government without oversight. I'm very pro government but oversight is required for it to function properly in my mind.

5-10 years ago was the source of the problem. We're seeing the fruits of this now.

What an interesting argument about decentralising. I hadn't thought about it like that before. Thank you!

I’m not a believer that vaccine science is a matter of “public” debate. It’s scientific debate, where only experts who have the tools, experience, and knowledge to argue should be allowed to weigh in. If you already have the problem of bad actors misappropriating yet-to-be-verified “scientific” claims for their own political agenda, then I don’t see why it’s right to let those ideas go out there.

I believe that people only have the right to speak their own opinion, but have none to spread disinformation.

But vaccination can't be as binary as that it's "safe" and that it's "effective" for each and every individual. As a layman I can't accept binary beliefs given like that. Nothing is truly safe. These words are meaningless to me. Everything has trade-offs and risks associated. Claiming something can be "safe and effective" to me throws so many red flags.

How can I tell if the research done on the subject and conclusions of it are in my best interests? For me easy example and what concerns me about both covid and vaccines are the long term effects, like brain fog aka "long covid". If vaccines can cause similar symptoms to what covid can cause, then can vaccines cause "long covid"? If spike protein can reach brain for example can it give you brain fog indefinitely?

I've seen several anecdotal reports where people have had brain fog, fatigue, lethargy and other long covid symptoms after vaccines for many months, some claiming they are still not over those. Reading Pfizer study for instance, I don't see that this was researched at all. All everybody seems to be caring about is short term hospitalizations, deaths and side effects. But where can I find data on how large percentage of people have long covid either from vaccines, or covid or breakthrough after vaccine?

There was a study done according to which 19% of individuals who had taken a vaccine and got breakthrough after had long covid. I definitely would like to see more information about that as I definitely don't want to get brain fog lasting for many months.

The study in question: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2109072

Experts should be allowed to weigh in, not office workers and bureaucrats. Where were the aerosol dispersion specialists when the CDC/WHO were preaching "droplet?"

But much of the debate isn't strictly scientific. What is appropriate policy is not something science can determine. People who will be affected by policy absolutely should weigh in on it.

Okay, but we really need to talk about what “stifling of public debate” means.

Companies are routinely pressured to fire people in public positions who espouse pro-Palestinian views.

Across the nation, states are enacting legal bans against teaching the history of racism, and firing teachers who dare to make students uncomfortable (by the same people who decried “safe spaces” less than a decade ago). Plenty of people on HN support this!

But for some reason, the only “free speech” issues that get attention here are radical right-wing viewpoints that get moderated on private tech platforms.

People don’t get fired for being pro Palestinian they get fired for being violently anti-Israel. Don’t conflate the two.

In Texas, as a schoolteacher, you must agree not to boycott Israel. Is boycotting violence?

I feel that is overreach by the state (and there are quite a few others), but I would also ask if boycotting is not violence then not using a specific pronoun would fall in the same category as the above -impolite but not violent.

As a teacher, your job is to educate in the subject, teach some social behaviors (civics0 and stay away from political indoctrination.

It isn't an overstep, but is probably just a weird method for compliance. The Export Administration Regulation is a US federal law that includes penalties for supporting boycotts of US trade partners and allies. Normally this is directed towards anti-Israel boycotts in the middle east where legislation in several countries prohibit trade with organizations that also trade with Israel. If a US entity adheres to that country's boycott by refusing business with Israel, then they are in a legally actionable position. I don't personally know how Texas may be notifying people about compliance requirements, but this is actually pretty standard language in many contracts involving export compliance sections.

We are on a news site focused mostly on tech, startups, and entrepreneurship that often just has other intellectual conversations. It makes sense that the general flavor of submissions leans tech.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> states are enacting legal bans against teaching the history of racism

There's a big difference between keeping government employees from saying certain things during their official duties, and keeping everyone from saying certain things in general.

Sure, but there’s also a big difference between keeping YouTube users from saying certain things on YouTube, and keeping everyone from saying certain things in general.

That's not the equivalent. The equivalent would be keeping Google employees from saying certain things on YouTube with their work accounts.

The article is about keeping YouTube users from saying certain things on YouTube.

Ah, the irony of your root comment getting censored by being flagged in a thread about censorship, because it wasn't popular.

You can really feel the commitment to public debate!

what was the above comment?

Turn on showdead in your profile and you'll be able to see it.

Precisely. This is a private company taking a stand against dangerous medical disinformation in the middle of a pandemic and HN is willing to die on this hill. Meanwhile I see HN cheer what you just mentioned. It churns the stomach.

Reminds me of how Reddit just dropped the ban hammer threat on /r/hermancainaward because it was making right-wingers angry, while leaving up /r/conspiracy and other antivaxx disinformation subreddits. The faces of the dead have to be censored now, sanitizing the entire experience of /r/hermancainaward, making the experience little more than a bunch of anonymous antivaxx memes.

It's possible but what needs to be added to this (very common) what-if is the anti-pattern your response creates for solving complex problems. "Chilling effect" concerns have been raised since '08 or so, and that platforms have unilaterally moved on with a decision indicates to me the failure of this approach. What does that show?

It's a (very, very valid) counterpoint that's ultimately a slippery slope argument in disguise. Slippery slope arguments rarely present a way out of a mess, and instead just serve as this semi-stakeholder that won't help solve things but adds nice insight. A position's side needs to be more than just a slippery slope approach, in short. It's important to sense when "something" is going to get done, and shift from wise advice on second order effects to something more outcomes-oriented.

Why should you jump trough so many hoops to convey some information.

Why an anti mandatory vaccine person shouldn't be able to explain his position?

> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that.

No such study exists, please link to the primary research. Vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus [1], and more importantly, even if they offered equivalent protection for 99% of people, the portion of the additional 1% of people without a vaccine who show up at a hospital are going to be much sicker than the vaccinated with breakthrough infections and more likely to need to go or stay at a hospital for an extended period of time (29x more likely [2]), which our healthcare system cannot support. We've had to ration care and kick out cancer patients out of hospitals [3], who have subsequently died as a result of lack of care, but we should allow for limited resources to be used up by the willfully unvaccinated? I have personally had family members in need of critical care have care rationed due to hospitals being full with 99%+ unvaccinated folks. So much for the personal responsibility crowd living up to their slogans.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/24/cdc-study-shows-unvaccinated... [3] https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article25394605...

That’s not really true that vaccination is always more protective, immunology is complex and there’s more interesting nuance to that. See the latest twiv with Shane Crotty, he goes into detail about how natural infection plus one shot creates a better response than reversing the order.

I’m not wringing my hands over anti vax content being pulled at all, but I don’t think we should be reductive about the science. That doesn’t help to establish trust.

You're simply wrong

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2101

This religious fervor that has developed around the vaccine has done as much to burn the establishment's credibility as anything.

The article doesn't say what you think it says. Please post a link to a peer reviewed article that shows that natural immunity drives better reinfection outcomes and recovery rates than vaccines do.

There is conflicting research in this area. It's too early to declare any definitive conclusions yet.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

There is no conflicting research and the conclusion drawn by this research needs further parsing as it may not be applicable to all populations.

Nonetheless, this study should not be taken as an endorsement that getting infected is a better overall option for protection than the highly effective vaccines.

That's not conflicting research and they very clearly state that this is not peer reviewed yet. I'd hold off on using this as the basis for any claim until then.

This is recent and not peer reviewed:https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

And here's some news from Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762

I'd say that is pretty clear cut when looking at the numbers from Israel.

moreover, if you're not monitoring israel for news ahead of time, and waiting for "cited research" you're gonna be too slow.

I was ahead of the game several months about "vaccination not categorically preventing spread of delta" watching israel.

Note that this is specifically the case in regards to the Delta variant. All prior variants showed the vaccine being much more effective than infection immunity.

Although, even with this, getting both still provides even greater immunity with no downside.

(Plus I think far too many people will say "oh, I had a cold sometime in the last year but didn't get tested. That was probably COVID so I have an excuse to not get vaccinated now.")

Dude. I'm not debating if it's good or or bad.

I personally had the vaccine because I have high blood pressure and I'm borderline diabetic at 40+. I made my call and took my chances. Others should have the right to make their own call.

I'm saying that "no downside" and those sort of claims are outright false and people should have the right to choose for themselves wherether the risks are worth the reward.

Tell this Lisa Shaw's family that there are no downsides: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-58330796

Also here'a copy paste from the FDA meeting from oct 2020: FDA Safety Surveillance of COVID-19 Vaccines : DRAFTWorking list of possible adverse event outcomes*Subject to change*Guillain-Barré syndrome Acute disseminated encephalomyelitisTransverse myelitisEncephalitis/myelitis/encephalomyelitis/ meningoencephalitis/meningitis/ encepholapathyConvulsions/seizuresStrokeNarcolepsy and cataplexyAnaphylaxisAcute myocardial infarctionMyocarditis/pericarditisAutoimmune diseaseDeathsPregnancy and birth outcomesOther acute demyelinating diseasesNon-anaphylactic allergic reactionsThrombocytopeniaDisseminated intravascular coagulationVenous thromboembolismArthritis and arthralgia/joint painKawasaki diseaseMultisystem I nflammatory Syndrome in ChildrenVaccine enhanced disease

While unfortunate, that's a much better statistical outcome than getting COVID, for the hundreds of millions who got COVID and have some form of long COVID, and 4.55M dead as of today.

Note, Israel is not "one of the most vaccinated countries".

It's not even in top 25.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Vaccines work by prompting a targeted (partial) immune response. They give your body advanced designs for part of the virus so it can be proactive - the con is a vaccine can not provide all of the information.

Contracting a virus provides your body with the full genetic footprint of the virus. Assuming you survive, you should have better antibodies than what a vaccine can provide.

A compelling theory! If only it were so simple.

In practice it doesn't actually work out that way. 1/3 of people who get covid have no antibodies at all, whereas everyone (who is not immunocompromised) who gets the vaccine develops antibodies.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...

The immune system is very complicated.

There is more to the immune system than antibodies. In order to fully assess immunity you have to look at innate responses and memory cell activity.

Sure, absolutely. The point the author is making is that since you're more likely to get an antibody response with the vaccine, you're getting a benefit from the vaccine that there's a decent chance you won't get from catching the virus.

Your first link does not actually claim that “vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus”. It indicates “among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 [the study] shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus”. So it’s comparing infected + vaccinated to just infected, not just infected vs just vaccinated.

You have just (unintentionally) shared misinformation about the vaccine. Would you support deleting your comment from HN?

Or even their entire account (to continue with the YouTube parallel).

So rephrasing what you said, unvaccinated individuals who are twice as likely to get reinfected than those with a who were vaccinated after infection means that vaccination doesn't always offer stronger protection than getting the virus?

This isn't exhaustive in the sense that it doesn't cover all permutations of vaccinated, infected, and, but it shows that at least infected + vaccinated is better than infected. That seems to meet the criteria that vaccination always offer stronger protection than getting the virus (at least in the vaccinated + infected vs infected populations).

But even a cursory glance at the study shows that the authors of the study knew this wasn't exhaustive, but they cite research [1] backing up OPs claim, and then add their voice to back up that vaccine > infection, vaccine + infection > infection, and make OPs conclusion in the Discussion section.

RTFS

[1]https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0817/10/2/138

> This isn't exhaustive in the sense that it doesn't cover all permutations of vaccinated, infected, and, but it shows that at least infected + vaccinated is better than infected. That seems to meet the criteria that vaccination always offer stronger protection than getting the virus (at least in the vaccinated + infected vs infected populations).

It is consistent with that criteria, but generally “always” means something stronger than “we have evidence it holds in one case”. Especially if that case is the rarest permutation.

> But even a cursory glance at the study shows that the authors of the study knew this wasn't exhaustive, but they cite research [1] backing up OPs claim, and then add their voice to back up that vaccine > infection, vaccine + infection > infection, and make OPs conclusion in the Discussion section.

The paper you just linked was cited on the line “Reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 has been documented, but the scientific understanding of natural infection-derived immunity is still emerging” in the OP’s article. The closest line I can find to “back up that vaccine > infection” is an offhand “ Although such laboratory evidence continues to suggest that vaccination provides improved neutralization of SARS-CoV-2 variants, limited evidence in real-world settings to date corroborates the findings that vaccination can provide improved protection for previously infected persons” which doesn’t seem like a particularly strong stance for “vaccine > infection”. Especially when we get back to the original claim which used “always”.

And it appears that they may have been wise in not going that far, since now that we have studies in review that directly measure the endpoints we’re discussing it’s certainly not clear that this is true[1][2].

I’ll wait for those to get peer reviewed and more widely discussed before I’d be comfortable saying “in most cases infection > vaccine” (note I didn’t use the word “always”, which I doubt any researcher or clinician would) but the actual opposing claims in the papers you’ve cited are comparatively tangential to the original “always vaccine > infection” claim.

[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.20.21255670v... [2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

This was in the context of reinfections, read the context of the comments and the article. The argument being made is that because someone got infected with COVID, they should not need to get a vaccine because natural immunity provides better protection, which is clearly false per the CDC. You are less likely to get reinfected or wind up in the hospital, per the article: "The study of hundreds of Kentucky residents with previous infections through June 2021 found that those who were unvaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated. The findings suggest that among people who have had COVID-19 previously, getting fully vaccinated provides additional protection against reinfection. Additionally, a second publication from MMWR shows vaccines prevented COVID-19 related hospitalizations among the highest risk age groups. As cases, hospitalizations, and deaths rise, the data in today’s MMWR reinforce that COVID-19 vaccines are the best way to prevent COVID-19."

I have trouble seeing how “vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus” could be equivalent to “getting the virus plus vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus”. But anyway you made a clearer claim this time around:

> The argument being made is that because someone got infected with COVID, they should not need to get a vaccine because natural immunity provides better protection, which is clearly false per the CDC.

That link and the study it cited did not compare natural immunity to vaccine protection, since every participant had been previously infected with COVID. That is inherent in the fact that the study examined reinfection, and they are clear that the vaccination occurred after the original infection. You can not compare two populations when one of them does not exist in your study!

The tradeoff is always the benefit of getting vaccinated weighed against the potential harm of side-effects. The only strong claim made on behalf of the efficacy of the vaccines is that they will greatly reduce the vaccinated individual's chance of hospitalization and death. Those chances vary due to a number of factors, age and obesity being just two of the most important. An otherwise fit and healthy individual in his or her twenties or thirties already has a low chance of being hospitalized or dying. But, for the sake of argument, let's agree that the benefit outweighs the risk.

That benefit to risk ratio changes if that same young, fit, and healthy individual has already been infected with COVID-19. So, now what's the tradeoff? My original point is that in the current environment, there are some people who would rather not only that this not be discussed; some would rather that discussion—and perhaps even research into the question—be shut down.

Let's not pretend we're being governed by scientists. We're being governed by bureaucrats. No matter their credentials, the function of a bureaucrat is gaining compliance and expanding his or her department. That's what's behind calls for censorship.

Right to ask, but not without also balancing against the issue of people being utter idiots. A little sensible conversation has lead to tens of thousands of hours doctors talking patients down when they come in demanding anti-parasitic medicines.

I don't know what the best balance is. One thing is evident: social media is not the venue for scientific debate.

>anti-parasitic medicines

Protease inhibitors* , similar to the one Pfizer is testing right now for COVID.

I think he was talking about Ivermectin, which is a glutamate-gated chloride channel binder. I've never heard of people taking unprescribed protease inhibitors, although I guess there's no end to snake oil.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996102/

>Ivermectin was found as a blocker of viral replicase, protease and human TMPRSS2, which could be the biophysical basis behind its antiviral efficiency.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-01577-x

>Our results indicate that boceprevir, ombitasvir, paritaprevir, tipranavir, ivermectin, and micafungin exhibited inhibitory effect towards 3CLpro enzymatic activity.

No, they're not licensed for that. They're still testing. And that's even forgiving how much work the word "similar" is doing there.

It is still the case that thousands of people are badgering their HCPs, trying to get off-licence scripts for something that's efficacy is contested and method isn't certain.

The Venn diagram between people who want wormer and those that refuse a vaccine is practically a circle. I stand by my original statement on what sort of people these are.

If you want to have a chat about the ongoing research into protease inhibitors, that's great, but anecdotes about curing it with an ill-gotten tube of horse medicine is as dangerous and virulent as covid in the first place.

It's not a perfect circle. I fixed my vaccine induced long haul covid symptoms that tested negative with the horsey paste.

> One thing is evident: social media is not the venue for scientific debate.

Hum... Any place people can gather to have an online debate is social media. That's the wrong dimension to use here.

The only reason You can watch any video for free on Youtube at all is because Youtube chooses to let you do so. It is not a public forum for debate, it is a business.

They still use enough of the public commons to be held to account.

Not sure what You mean. Do You mean Youtube use other business’ wires, electricity, and services that Youtube pays for to provide You with free videos?

You could go lots of places with it. Tax breaks wherever they build and locate anything physical, section 230, and yeah everything else infrastructure that they use and rely on. Protocols, open source, gov technical bodies etc.

To me this is the key, I got the myocarditis symptoms post vaccine and notably none of the ER staff knew (or wished to acknowledge) that this was a potential sideffect. It's become heresy of the most dogmatic kind to not support the vaccine full stop.

Also it took an unrelated to this situation healthcare worker (therapist) to even suggest to me to report it on https://vaers.hhs.gov/ which is how they find out if the vaccine has side effects.

IMO we need to tolerate a lot of "free speech" in order to ensure the validly dissenting voices are not squashed.

What does this anecdote have to do with free speech? In my country rare cases of myocarditis were listed as a possible side effect immediately after the first potential cases came up and it was also all over the media. Do you claim that in your country the information was not available because of censorship and you nearly died? Which country do you live in? And what kind of medical doctor would not investigate a possible case of myocarditis (or any other kind of heart problems)?

> And what kind of medical doctor would not investigate a possible case of myocarditis (or any other kind of heart problems)?

One that fears ostracism from their peers or profession. In my region it's become heresy to even consider there may be risks to taking the "safe" vaccine.

I personally experienced this even before the vaccine's efficacy/safety was established when I expressed concerns about the medical industry's track record citing thalidomide (fetal deformities) and omeprazole (stomach cancer) as two cases where things were "safe" until they were not.

That's crazy and I'm sorry to hear that. I guess I'm lucky to have only had doctors so far in my life who listen to their patients and exclude possible diseases with the usual diagnostics. Sometimes medical doctors simplify small risks because laymen are often unable to judge them adequately in lack of good comparisons. The better way would be to provide meaningful comparisons, though.

If freedom of speech - as a concept - doesn't protect the worst of us, it won't protect the rest of us.

It's highly debatable (bold face on that!!), but I'm not sure that Youtube counts as public debate. If you look at the comments sections on Youtube articles about vaccination, you will find a lot of manifestly false or misinterpreted information. If argued against, people will link to their evidence, which, unsurprisingly, is usually other Youtube videos. This is when you can go down a depressing rabbit hole. These are usually videos, slickly produced, making probably-intentionally bad faith arguments against vaccination. They will take public statements out of context, misinterpret public data, and use a combination of charisma and good (if scrappy) production values to give the viewer the sense that they are the ones telling you the truth. You will find these videos on pretty much any subject, and the makers are clearly monetizing them. You can then go down a rabbit hole, viewing video after video, each providing you with another nugget the confirms your growing suspicion that they're all out to get you.

While it's, again, highly debatable, increasingly to me these videos do not count as public debate, though they are certainly an exercise in free speech. They are not public debate because they do not subject themselves to any form of such debate and intentionally avoid it. If you want skeptical takes on left wing politics, you can see public debate on, say WSJ, Fox News, even OANN. Public in the sense that they put themselves out there in the public sphere and can be scrutinized thusly. These shadowy Youtube articles clearly bank themselves on A) not being found by people who will disagree, or B) have an audience who increasingly will not seek out or countenance opposing viewpoints.

The chilling effect is made worse by the fact that this censorship is conducted entirely by algorithms, and there are no reasonable channels available for appeal other than knowing Google employees or hoping to gain viral traction on other social media.

Rational people making a living from their channels will therefore decide to avoid the topic entirely, even if they have something substantive to add that’s in the public interest.

They're banning a set of channels that are known to be spreading vaccine lies and then they're also banning videos that are claiming that vaccines aren't safe.

We know they're safe because they undergo exhaustive testing. Banning videos from people that are lying isn't stifling debate, it's banning lies.

Do you agree they should also ban the lies about Russian collision? What about the lies about Hunter B.'s laptop? What about the videos of Fauci saying we shouldn't be wearing masks?

Most MDs are general physicians and know little about vaccines other than textbook knowledge that is decades old. Why would you trust them over a team of researchers? Especially at this point of the pandemic when we have so much data showing their effectiveness?

I generally trust MDs here more than others. That doesn't mean that some MDs couldn't be completely wrong. But almost all MDs agree that vaccines are very effective.

MDs have, via connections such as subscriptions to medical publications and net sites or databases, access to more information than most people, and because of their training have an ability to assess information, including which teams of researchers are doing genuine science, and which are selling horse dewormers.

I think one of the things we need to appreciate is the scale of video uploads that YouTube has to deal with. There are something like hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Aside from dodgy medical advice, they need to look out for child pornography, revenge porn, snuff videos and incitements to terrorism and violence, not to mention copyrighted content. There's no way they could hire enough people to review every single video that's uploaded, so if they're going to have any review at all, it has to be automated.

Getting their algorithm to have any understanding of content that's being uploaded is an extremely difficult problem, and the fact that they're able to do so with any degree of accuracy is an impressive achievement, whatever the merits. Expecting a YouTube algorithm to be able to parse a nuanced reasonable argument from bullshit is to expect a level of AI sophistication that doesn't exist yet.

YouTube could, and probably should, hire people to review videos from high profile YouTubers, but this is only going to work for people who've already established themselves. There's no way to scale that down to everyone that wants to upload something.

So yeah, moderate voices pointing out that people who have already had covid have a solid degree of acquired immunity, or maybe we shouldn't shut down schools are being clobbered. That's a bad thing but it's tough problem to solve.

I also think there's a broader problem that a handful of private companies have such control over public discourse that they're able to effectively censor ideas at all. Or maybe they're not so effective, but the level of control that Google, Facebook, etc, have should give us pause.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should go back to the free for all internet that we had in the 90's where everyone who got online had equal access. This would allow a level of nuanced moderate discussion that we desperately need, but it will also allow crazies, and child porn and terrorists and all the rest. If we don't want that kind of stuff to be easily available online, we need to figure out not just where to draw the line, but how to draw the line. This is a hard problem.

I'm curious what his evidence is, because I find this argument compelling: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...

The accumulation of "chilling effects" has now become a deep-freeze.

> It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

We should be worrying about the wackos -- and stifling legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

I doubt I will agree with exactly where Google draws the line between whacko and legitimate voice, but I have no doubt the line should be drawn.

I also think there's no doubt Google has the right (and responsibility, IMO) to draw the line on their platforms.

I welcome that chilling effect, because people who believe YouTube and other sites are required to not do censorship are completely wrong. Not only they are not required to keep everything, they actually have right to remove anything ironically by the first amendment. The only reason they don't do it because they want to appear neutral.

Having the false belief that they can't censor is actually dangerous, because it makes everyone pile up to one service starving and killing competition creating monopoly.

No one is stopping anyone from hosting their own website and getting on their own soap box. You just can't do it on this person's lawn anymore.

What happens when the company owns the whole town and you're not allowed to have your own lawn to speak on?

What happens when aliens land and vaporize us?

> he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine.

Actually the research shows the opposite: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-i...

> think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices

You have to weigh that against the known chilling effect caused by the disinformation campaign.

You also have to include the fact that the disinformation campaign is killing people. And that it is known to be partially funded by governments specifically to shut down discourse and destabilize the US.

> I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices

I argue that it won't. We have had over a year for Anti-vaccination advocates to make their case. In all instances the goalposts tend to move. Spotlighting continual questioning and false claims benefits no one. It's time to move on.

I think we have to ask whether adversaries have the right to run hogwild on western social media and spread disinformation.

We need to worry about the wackos especially, since these tend to network and radicalize more due to their skewed perception.

A prerequisite to the tasteful application of censorship in these cases is a functioning scientific and moral apparatus and strong civil society to keep things in the public interest.

It already has had a massive chilling effect, because anyone that even raises the slightest question about the situation is labeled as some kind of right wing Trump supporting radical. A lot of very normal, thoughtful people are not okay with what is happening.

Correct, I am not ok with 10’s of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths because people believed dumb antivax memes on Facebook

Youtube should have instead declared war on the companies and people that are simply generating junk content to game their creator funds...

No one really wants to uncover the fact that most disinformation campaigns are simply created by people who are desperate to make money off of video views, and also those who want to sell off products (like horse de-wormer) that they may have an overstock of.

YouTube should de-monetize all independent and unverifiable political content instead of this censorship approach. Taking away the money making for people who just want to stoke public emotions to their benefit of popularity.

Politics should not be a for-profit business... No content platform wants to give that profit up because it generates a lot of money, but we face peril if the profits rise.

Make politics boring again. MPBA.

The wackos are the ones creating the context in which moderate voices lose their power. If you want moderation, you have to remove the extreme BS and the algorithms that thrive on it, which process buries moderates and makes their views anathema to the polarized extremes. Why allow polarized extremes to form on your private, I must emphasize privately owned, platform? This isn't the public square, freedom of speech does not guarantee freedom of reach. Content moderation is a good thing, it has the word moderate in it after all, that may signal that it promotes healthy dialogue just like public ridicule and scorn and shame should, in theory, moderate discourse actually covered by free speech in the public square, where it's not anonymous.

The wackos don't actually have the power to take down moderates as parent discusses. Only youtube has that power.

Content moderation is not inherently good or bad, it simply is. A version of Youtube that cracked down on well known science would be legal but not "good".

The problem is: who determines who the "wackos" are and what is and isn't "extreme BS"?

If it's defined by social consensus then during periods of groupthink and hysteria (common among humans) even the most reasonable people will be labeled wackos and shunned.

Do you think YouTube would be justified in banning ISIS recruitment videos, for example? After all, who’s to say that’s “extreme BS”?

Well, any ISIS content on the platform could be considered recruitment material. If in the content of the video no crime has been committed, YouTube would not be justified in banning ISIS recruitment videos or any of their content.

My preferred policy would be to only remove speech which is actively calling for violence.

This fits in line with a common conception of what we view as reasonable limits on free speech.

Removing speech of people sharing their beliefs about the risks and rewards of putting substances in their bodies or other medical decisions doesn't meet this standard.

> Removing speech of people sharing their beliefs about the risks and rewards of putting substances in their bodies or other medical decisions doesn't meet this standard.

That's different from spreading conspiracy theories about putting substance in their bodies. Actual disinformation (blatantly false) and not just discussing their hesitancy to get a vaccine.

If you want moderation, you need human moderators.

The trouble with the tech giants is that their "free service paid by ads" business model completely collapses into red numbers if they start employing adequate numbers of people for that purpose.

So they resort to artificial intelligence, which is worse than natural stupidity in this regard.

Not only that human moderators are better than ML moderators, but we probably want human moderators enmeshed in the community. Having Filipinos moderate the speech of Arizonians is not going to work very well.

It's just a never ending disaster once you go down that path. Because now people have to "select" their community somehow.

If that existed, I'd refuse to be part of whatever community you think I belong to and I'm going to pick the one least likely to interfere with me.

And if it's a forced choice, I'm going to fight that instead. I think you'll have to educate and then just let everyone say whatever they want.

You know, you don't HAVE to remove a video. Can just put another video above it that says "here's what we think is going on" and be done with it.

There should be a certain degree of cultural competency, though.

For example, Czech Facebook banned an ad with a word "Rifle" in it, because of an American ban on gun advertisements. But "Rifle" means "Blue Jeans" in Czech and nothing else. It is not a gun-related word in our language. And indeed the ad tried to sell blue jeans.

The moderation is the problem. Because it's fundamentally a cost center, and will never be resourced sufficiently to do a nuanced job.

Consequently, you get someone making minimum wage banning videos because they're not saying only positive things about vaccines.

And Google and Facebook won't care. Because moderation is a cost intended to curb the worst PR scandals, but content is profit.

>I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices

first, youtube isnt where open discussion by moderate voices happens. Its a cavalcade of endlessly random videos promoting everything from free energy to colloidal silver cures and get rich quick schemes.

Second, the topic of conversation is vaccination methodology during an ongoing pandemic in which a sizeable quantity of affected persons refuse to vaccinate. This is without a doubt a sensitive topic and likely shouldnt use Youtube as a forum. You should have a gatekeeper and there should be a minimum level of scientific competency and acumen required to participate in the conversation. A moderator should exist, and that moderator is not youtube.

Might i suggest matrix or signal? or perhaps even pleroma?

as an aside, the concept of an "anti-vaccine activist" is puerile and absolutely should be banned. No reasonable person would evangelize healthy adults forego vaccination during a global pandemic.

>>as an aside, the concept of an "anti-vaccine activist"

Well they change what "anti-vaccine" means [1], so now I am classified as a "person who has been vaccinated but is Anti-vaccine" because I oppose any and all governments mandates that would force a person to be vaccinated, or would impose conditions on them by government to participate in society.

private companies can impose them but government should not, not if we want to claim to be a free society.

Due to my position against authoritarian policies I am officially a "Vaccinated Anti-vaxxer" a oxymoronic label only government could come up with.

[1]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer

I never understood why vaccine mandates are so badly received. As long as there are solid exemptions in place, for proof of antibodies or twice a week testing, it should be normal to require it. The mandates themselves can be ok. I personally have a problem with the absolutely insane gaslighting that is happening in the US now. You are not allowed to question anything, or you get cancelled.

I am opposed to government mandates. Private companies, venues, etc I am fine with mandating vaccines.

Government, specifically the federal government, should not have that authority.

the concept of an "anti-vaccine activist" is puerile and absolutely should be banned.

This type of categorical banning from public discussion never works. It just creates martyrs.

There's an object lesson they sometimes do in university classes or corporate retreats where two people are asked to push against each other's hands. It usually ends with "why are you pushing so hard?" "Because you were pushing so hard."

There's a human instinct that many of us have that is basically "fight makes right." That is, when vehemence in opposition to a thing goes beyond a certain point, the vehemence becomes "evidence" that the thing being opposed must have some legitimacy to it, or else there wouldn't be so much energy dedicated to opposing it.

> This type of categorical banning from public discussion never works. It just creates martyrs.

I see this, or forms of it, oft repeated but it's never synced up with reality for me. Sure, you will have some hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool proponents of someone/some topic that will follow them to the ends of the earth but you stop the radicalization of so many more than I have to count it as a net-win. I used to be staunchly 100%-free-speech, no-holds-barred but I am, and have been, coming to the realization that it's simply not tenable when you factor in technology/internet. Banning Parlor from App Stores and infrastructure absolutely cut down on their users. Sure, some will continue to use it but you cut off the on-ramp for radicalization. Same story with YouTube, actually it's even MORE compelling for YouTube since the majority people going to Parlor were people already inclined to think a certain way (aka: believe the election was stolen, COVID is a hoax, Democrats drink baby's blood, etc). With YouTube we have endless examples of people being slowly radicalized as YouTube's algorithm takes them further and further down the rabbit hole and, unlike Parlor, you can start down that path while watching something completely innocuous. See also: Reddit banning T_D or other subs promoting violence and hatred.

Suppressing the visible symptom of a cultural problem -- Parler, YouTube videos, whatever -- doesn't solve the cultural problem. It just means you don't have to look at it if you don't want to. People are still rolling coal with their flags flying if that's what they want to do.

It's kind of like pushing homelessness underground, except the phenomenon being suppressed has a lot more potential energy. You squish a balloon, and the air/water just moves elsewhere. Eventually the balloon pops though, and we actually get to see what we've been trying to hide from and suppress.

Ok, I understand what you are saying but I think this is a little different from “hiding the homeless” or putting them on a bus with a one-way ticket. I agree that people will just go further underground however it does stop the initial radicalization.

People are on platforms like FB, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc because they expect them to be safe (different people will define that differently of course). They also expect most (if not all) the content to be true (of course we know this isn’t always the case). Allowing lies, dis/misinformation to spread on one of these platforms legitimizes it for people.

As humans we are much more likely to believe content we see on a major platform vs myrandomthoughts.blogspot.com. That said, once radicalized on a major platform you might believe the afore mentioned site but you wouldn’t have given it a second look prior to that. So again, preventing the initial radicalizing by not allowing disinformation laundering on major platform does have an impact and stops the slide down for many, many people.

> There's an object lesson they sometimes do in university classes or corporate retreats where two people are asked to push against each other's hands. It usually ends with "why are you pushing so hard?" "Because you were pushing so hard."

Perfect example is the current crop of vaccination mandates being pushed by the federal government. Look up "New reported doses administered by day", and you'll see the number of vaccines being administered has been declining since the mandates were announced. If your goal is to get more people vaccinated and promote public health, it turns out forcing people to do so and censoring discussion actually has the exact opposite effect.

> and you'll see the number of vaccines being administered has been declining since the mandates were announced

Correlation is not causation. It's easy to suppose that causation in fact runs the other way - the mandates come to the fore at the point when doses given are already declining due to running short on willing unvaccinated people, and the vaccination drive is perceived as needing an "extra push".

There is some real-world evidence that despite people complaining, uptake after a vaccine mandate is in fact high. e.g. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/28/1041360095/united-airlines-wo...

Why doesn't it work? The goal is to stop the spread of dangerous misinformation among heavily used platforms. Of course some people are going to act like martyrs about it and move their following to some other platform. But it won't be one with the same potential to spread as much. Which is the goal.

Why does it spread in the first place? Because half the country feels disenfranchised. You can't solve that problem by further disenfranchisement.

Nah. I was raised in a religiously conservative environment and was taught all sorts of weird beliefs that was also married to right wing politics, and the demonization of the left you could hear everyday on AM radio and Fox News. They aren't disenfranchised. They have a faulty worldview that isn't based on critical thinking or scientific evidence, and has been fueled by propaganda for decades.

I used to be a big proponent of US-style free speech. Now I'm skeptical that it's such a good thing. It appears to me that some uses of certain forms of media are dangerous to a democratic society. Not just on the right, but in general.

So you were raised in a religiously conservative environment and clearly don't think much of it, but you've also internalised the idea that truth should come from authority.

That does a disservice to science IMHO. 'Scientists' are not simply priests with different regalia. Fundamentally, the invite their experiments to be replicated or they're not scientists. Anything can be accepted as truth with the threat of sufficient violence.

Knowledge comes from empirical verification and logical or mathematical arguments. Experts in relevant fields are more likely to be correct and capable of understanding the subject material than the average person who expresses skepticism. That doesn't mean infallibility, and experts often enough disagree with one another. Violence has nothing to do with it.

When there is a consensus around a well established scientific set of facts or model, skepticism isn't warranted by the general public. People pushing conspiracy theories under certain circumstances are a danger to the public on large media platforms. Therefore, I support them being removed.

Experts do disagree with one another often enough... unless they're all in the pay of a single interest group or our filter bubbles prevent us from seeing the experts on one side of the disagreement. You might not think either of those is happening, but if you trust the experts first how would you know if the former was happening? And wouldn't removing people make the latter failure scenario more likely?

> first, youtube isnt where open discussion by moderate voices happens. Its a cavalcade of endlessly random videos promoting everything from free energy to colloidal silver cures and get rich quick schemes.

Youtube also has people doing educational videos. I can watch recorded lectures there, if I want. Why do we need a gatekeeper for that?

It also has videos of people just sharing their experiences. Should that be banned to, if those are negative about the vaccine? On what basis?

Honestly, the world has gone off the deep end. I don't even know where to start to explain, but it should be obvious for anyone what's wrong anyway.

the chilling effect in this case is by design.

MD is a just a general doctor correct? So, who is he to make that proclamation:

He doesn't have the expertise to say this.

MD means Doctor of Medicine, i.e., they completed medical school. Dr. Fauci is a Doctor of Medicine in that he completed medical school and received his MD.

After medical school, doctors will enter a residency program for a specialty, but they are still MDs (DOs are equivalent). Their post-graduate training (residency and fellowship) varies but they are still MDs. MDs who specialize in infectious disease or epidemiology are still MDs. MDs who specialize in family medicine are still MDs.

You are falsely inferring MD means GP (general practitioner) which it may or may not. And you are further falsely inferring that a GP cannot have expertise in virology and immunology, which they likely don't, but they may. If you were to conclude a GP does not have CREDENTIALS to speak authoritatively about virology and immunology, I'd accept that assertion.

Do you have the expertise to evaluate his expertise? Did the person who granted you proof of this expertise also have sufficient expertise to do so? What about the person above that? What is the root of expertise? Plato with his allegory of the cave, casually dismissing claims that come from the wrong mouths in his lofty opinion?

In my mind it would be simpler to evaluate claims as they are rather than bringing the speakers life story into it.

Don't be naive. It's not the wackos who won't have a platform. It's the people who know vaccines aren't dangerous, but realize they can snag an audience by claiming otherwise, so they prey on those people. These charlatans are the people who won't have a platform and, I say good riddance.

> Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that.

The studies from the CDC indicate the opposite: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm

Which studies are you referring to?

Try having a "legitimate public debate" about anything where the loudest 90% are there to be antagonistic for purely personal reasons (or, in English, jerks)

Really, about anything. Free software. Best football players. How to best build a bike shed.

Anyone with willingness for legitimate debate gets drowned by the noise.

> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that.

He was insisting without any studies? How is that not a problem?

If you look at the policy, you'll see that this isn't aiming at the doctor who says that some people don't need the vaccine, but specifically at people who spread specific claims that are considered solidly disproven with overwhelming consensus: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11161123

You definitely raise valid points about the side effects of false positives during enforcement and the resulting self-censorship, but the other side of the coin is that we've seen that we unfortunately do have to worry about the wackos too.

> It's the stifling of legitimate public debate

No, non-State actors choosing what messages to relay or not with their resources is fundamentally the conduct of public debate, not its suppression.

*May

The word May is doing a lot of work in this paragraph.

youtube is a private company, they can ban you for whatever reason they want, presumably. Youtube, google, facebook, they aren't public services.

Of course they can, because they do. What are you really trying to say? Is it that you believe no other moral authority should exist besides the law?

What do you think I am trying to say? It's not hard. If you don't like what youtube are doing then don't use youtube. They are beholden to their shareholders, not you.

So you favor a kind of libertarian capitalism where the problems caused by businesses are the responsibility of people suffering from them? If you don't like being addicted to heroin, don't buy heroin?

Since you asked, to be honest, I don't believe you know what you're trying to say and are just repeating an argument you've heard before and didn't think critically about. But I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt and see if I can learn some deeper idea you may have had.

Eh? I'm in favor of YouTube banning anti vaxxers. So I'm definitely not libertarian, where as you seem to be in favor of anyone at all being able to post on YouTube without censorship - doesn't that make you more the libertarian? What a confusing conversation we find ourselves in! Good day!

> I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices.

That's the point of all censorship. It isn't to censor the truly outrageous wackos spouting nonsense since hardly anyone believes them and most laugh at them. It's to censor the moderates who critically analyze and perhaps offer some truth.

Heliocentrism has been around since the ancient greeks which the church leaders could easily write off as being the ideas of backwards pagans. After all, you can see for yourself that the sun rises in the east and crosses the sky and sets in the west. They could "prove" it to the laity. It was only when telescopes and scientific evidence proved that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth that the church started censoring, excommunicating and killing people. The censorship wasn't to silence the uneducated wackos, it was to silence the likes of galileo, copernicus, etc.

Is your claim that moderate voices are causing people to not get vaccinated then?

If that is the case maybe silencing them isn't a bad thing so that we can get past the pandemic rather than wallowing in "would we should we" territory.

EDIT: To be clear this was meant to be a joke about loosely defining "moderate". Many things are being said that aren't "Bill Gates is tracking you" that are also staunchly anti vaxx such as "it doesn't actually work" and "it can kill you".

> Is your claim that moderate voices are causing people to not get vaccinated then?

I suspect that's the case for the vast majority of the unvaccinated. Do you think most of the unvaccinated people are unvaccinated because of "metal chips in the vaccine" or "it's the serum of the devil"? Or do you think they are unvaccinated because they read up on the history of vaccines, talked to their doctors, etc?

> If that is the case maybe silencing them isn't a bad thing so that we can get past the pandemic rather than wallowing in "would we should we" territory.

But aren't we past the pandemic. I remember being told that we needed herd immunity. Remember "herd immunity"? It was all over the news and social media just a few months. Now we are way past herd immunity. It was the gold standard. Remember? To question it was to question science. But everyone forgot about herd immunity.

It's never good to silence moderate voices as it only leaves you the choice of extremes which tend to be wrong. And sadly, as it pertains to covid, the extremes have been wrong about covid - everything from death rate to mandates to metal chips...

Also, I can't think of another time moderate voices were silenced - other than the lead up to the 2nd iraq war when you absolutely could not question the lies about wmds. Can you?

> Or do you think they are unvaccinated because they read up on the history of vaccines, talked to their doctors, etc?

The history of vaccines shows a phenomenal success rate. And most physicians are in support due to the enormous impact vaccination has on hospitalization rates.

The problem is your definition of "moderate" is flawed. You have included craziness as part of the spectrum which isn't correct.

Many have said "it doesn't really work" or "somebody died from it" which are not moderate statements at all. Those are quite anti-vaxx when you dig into how skewed the numbers really are.

Trials so far have shown over a 90% drop in hospitalization during reinfection cases IIRC. Similarly in July 2021 there were 3 known deaths from 339 million doses. Hell there were 6,207 deaths from people who had been vaccinated (the 6,204 other cases were found to be unrelated)

> Now that we are way past herd immunity

We aren't past herd immunity. At all. 70% is a low ball number for herd immunity, many suggested a large rate is needed given the fast spreading of the virus. California is sitting at 58.8%.

> And sadly, as it pertains to covid, the extremes have been wrong about covid - everything from death rate

I mean the US has had 43 million cases and 693,000 deaths. It has so far killed 1.5% of the confirmed cases. I remember there were error bars from 1-3% but I believe since early 2020 that has been the expected range for cases. (Actual death rate requires knowing the infection rate which is super hard to do unfortunately)

> The history of vaccines shows a phenomenal success rate.

Absolutely. I'm vaccinated against a lot of the terrible diseases. Grateful for it. But the history of vaccines is also littered with missteps and unethical behavior as well.

> The problem is your definition of "moderate" is flawed. You have included craziness as part of the spectrum which isn't correct.

Nope. My definition of moderate is moderate. Being open to the facts and weighing the data and the ability to question orthodoxy - especially when orthodoxy has been wrong so many times.

> And most physicians are in support due to the enormous impact vaccination has on hospitalization rates.

Sure. Especially for the most vulnerable population - the elderly, people with immune system issues, etc.

> We aren't past herd immunity. At all. 70% is a low ball number for herd immunity, many suggested a large rate is needed given the fast spreading of the virus. California is sitting at 58.8%.

You are conflating "vaccinated" with herd immunity. Isn't vaccinated + those who had covid ( the original and natural vaccine ) over 90%? I may be wrong. Is 70% a "low ball"? I remember the original herd immunity was 60-70% and 70% was the high end. Then what's the herd immunity number?

> I mean the US has had 43 million cases and 693,000 deaths. It has so far killed 1.5% of the confirmed cases.

Now add in the "nonconfirmed cases" and how low does that 1.5% go.

I was for lockdown. I think the states that locked down should stay locked down for the duration of the pandemic so that we have useful data to compare against the non-lockdown states/countries. I'm for people getting vaccinated - especially the at-risk people. But why are you being so intentionally misleading? You try to mislead with only "confirmed cases". You try to mislead by conflating vaccination rate to herd immunity. If you have truth, science and data on your side why be so sneaky with the data and labels?

If you truly wanted the pandemic to be over, shouldn't you be celebrating the vaccine rate + people who got covid? Is your goal the end of the pandemic or that everyone get a shot? Because they aren't the same thing.

> I remember the original herd immunity was 60-70% and 70% was the high end. Then what's the herd immunity number?

The target is 100%-100%/R0.

The original COVID had an R0 of 3-ish, so 60-70% was plenty; delta has an R0 more like 8-9, so the new target is more like 90%.

Typical high-end infection rates were estimated at 25-35% of the population in most of the US after the second wave. 60% vaccination rates plus 35% infection rates gives you about 75% with some form of immunity, which was enough to shut down the original COVID, but not enough to shut down the Delta variant.

We aren't going to call the pandemic over because the numbers made it.

We are going to call the pandemic over when people stop dying. Things were looking good until the Delta variant hit.

> But everyone forgot about herd immunity.

You may be beyond herd immunity, but most pro authoritarian/pro vaxxers I've spoken with on HN and elsewhere still firmly believe that the vaccine provides immunity, and to question it is to question The Science.

You are working from alternative facts and therefore by definition a wacko. Sorry, this turned into a completely flippant comment, but I don't know where to go from here. You only have to scroll down a few comments from here to discover someone who is still insisting that herd immunity is reachable via vaccination. What is there to say when people believe the sort of thing completely contrary to all of the science, and they're backed up by plenty of people who know better but find it convenient for them to believe it?

And that there is the root of the problem I have with the recent discourse. That the ends (fighting covid) justify the means (silencing legitimate debate, chilling effects, authoritarianism). I disagree in the strongest of terms.

The real concern is what happens when a truly scary leader gets their hands on those new powers you've just handed them.

As always, these debates need to happen in the open, as messy as that is. Shine light on bad ideas, don't let them fester in the cellar.

We aren't talking about a government. We are talking about private businesses.

These aren't debates, they are shouted opinions to the ether.

Honestly the bit about censorship not being bad was a bit. The "moderates" only reduce vaccination rate if you define moderate to include "it isn't that effective" or "you could die" which isn't a good definition of moderate.

If you truly think this point of view is the right thing, consider replacing the word "vaccination" with "war". e.g. "Is your claim that moderate voices are causing people to hurt the war effort? If that is the case maybe silencing them isn't a bad thing".

If you allow corporations and governments to censor reasonable and moderate opinions at this juncture don't be shocked when it's used in the future in a context that you don't like, when a sufficiently large surveillance and technological state leaves you powerless to do anything about it.

So reducing the deaths is the equivalent of supporting war?

Actual moderates are fine. "Maybe you shouldn't get it" requires ignoring the 90% reduction in hospitalization rates for those vaccinated and the existence of only 1 in 100 million deaths from the vaccine from a side effect that doctors are actively on the look out for.

Maybe a healthy 25-year-old who has already recovered from COVID-19, who has been tested for antibodies and still shows a significant level of them, shouldn't get the vaccine, given analysis of the individual's benefit to risk ratio.

I'm the OP here, and the doctor with the YouTube channel I referred to was asking questions like the above. And after raising the issue adds, "I encourage you to speak with your doctor."

Off topic, but as an astronomer I have to dispute your characterization of the development of heliocentric theory. Around the time of Copernicus and Galileo heliocentrism was a radical idea, but it also had a number of problems. Astronomers of the time expected that if heliocentrism was true and the Earth was moving we should observe parallax of the stars as the Earth orbits the Sun. But no such parallax was observed (and it took another three centuries before telescopes were good enough to measure this phenomenon). In fact it was more than 150 years before any direct proof of the Earth's motion was found (from a measurement of the aberration of light at the end of the 17th century).

Of course Galileo was put under house arrest and Bruno was burned at the stake, but in the case of Galileo, the reasons were more political in nature (going out of his way to insult the pope), and in the case of Bruno it was because of his heretical theological ideas (like the idea that the Trinity doesn't exist) rather than his scientific ideas. That doesn't excuse the Church's actions, but they really just weren't all that interested in the science.

> and in the case of Bruno it was because of his heretical theological ideas (like the idea that the Trinity doesn't exist) rather than his scientific ideas.

No, it was not. See http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-a... - those things are not seperable.

I do agree with the broader point, which is that there is something we could broadly call a "culture of free speech," and the Church was certainly not in favor of a culture of free speech.

However, on the specific point of what got Bruno in trouble with the Church, it was definitely with regard to his theological ideas. Debates on whether or not there were other worlds and beings living on other worlds were a popular subject among academics back in the Middle Ages. In fact St. Thomas Aquinas had taken the other position, namely that no other worlds existed, and the Church condemned his argument as heretical because they interpreted him to have said that God could not have created other worlds, which would place limits on God's power.

Again, none of this is to excuse the Church's persecution of Galileo, Bruno, or any of the other figures cited in the blog post you cite. Making a great intellectual discovery, scientific or otherwise, always requires some break with the conventional wisdom, and figures who are willing to do this in one area are likely to do it in other areas, too. Even if they happen to be wrong on many of these other fronts, they're following their train of logic to wherever it leads, and if you cut off those trains that produce socially inconvenient truths (think Newton's experiments with alchemy or his work on hermeneutics), you risk losing their ideas that turn out to be correct.

The problem with your argument is that you assume that legitimate voices won't be coöpted by people pushing some agenda that is not supported by any data; i.e. you assume that the people on the other side of the "public debate" are operating in good faith. There is no debate when one side is not seriously & honestly looking at the data.

It's good to debate science and to question whether vaccines are safe and effective. The problem is that if someone with any credentials asks these questions in public, a firestorm of antivaxxers will immediately create thousands of posts claiming "doctor questions the safety of the vaccines." Most people who read those posts won't take the time to understand the nuance -- their takeaway will be "this confirms my belief that the vaccine was rushed/etc."

That's not to say that these debates shouldn't happen -- they absolutely should, but not on YouTube or social media where nuance is easily lost. During a global pandemic the consequence of airing objections in public on social media can mean that thousands of people might not get vaccinated because of bad or malicious actors. That leads to real deaths.

By censoring the debate on youtube, you're basically confirming to the wacko conspiracy theorists that there is in fact a conspiracy. The damage to civil society is far greater than a little misinformation.

The solution to bad speech is more speech. Speaking of nuance easily lost, an algorithm is not going to be able to figure out the nuance required to censor rationally. Honestly, I don't think most humans are capable of it. Best to err on the side of letting information spread.

"By censoring the debate on youtube, you're basically confirming to the wacko conspiracy theorists that there is in fact a conspiracy."

This is an excellent point. My view has been these are wackos but you can't silence wackos without giving someone in authority the discretion to decide who to label a wacko. But as you point out, having the discretion to decide someone is a wacko and has ideas too dangerous to be heard, at a large organized scale, actually is a conspiracy.

Written by a Google employee. This totalitarian thinking is a perfect example why the US is declining so rapidly into a poorer oligarchy. He (Xir?) is convinced that vaccines are necessary for COVID, and that plebes that use his product are too stupid for "nuance". Thus it should be banned speech. Thinking about it, there were discussions even in Nazi Germany or in the Soviet Russia: except that plebes went jail for them. They were the privilege of the very top: like Hitler discussing with Goebbels or Brezhnev with Kosygin. Or Pichai with Wojcicy in his oligarchical case.

Agree, I saw multiple times that someone who actually discussing topic from their area from expertise, who tried to remove some hyperbole media added. For example he was saying that lockdowns (like an actual lockdowns) only made sense initially when there was a possibility to contain it.

The anti-vaxxers cut it out of context and spreaded it on FB and sounded like someone with credentials was basically saying that all precautions were not needed and this was all fake pandemic (this was a year ago, BTW before we had vaccines).

who is saying people that have had COVID shouldn't vaccinate? because they're wrong.

Maybe not the second shot. But if you've had covid, you should 100% get vaccinated.

I agree with most of what you said but my opinion is that right wing media, radio show hosts and podcasters have pushed it too far this time by peddling conspiracy theories that are doing actual harm to populace at large.

Yes, making claims about vaccines with without basis is "anti-vax"

Does this include those that made claims about the effectiveness of the vaccine that turned out to be overstated?

It depends on who was making those claims, and if those claims were made in good-faith and with the best-available information at the time.

Is somebody who makes the claim that vaccines are better than natural immunity actually "anti-vax"?

What should happen here? Do we not allow YouTube to ban content they don’t want on their platform? What type of content? Just anti vax or anything that’s not illegal? Should YouTube be forced to host racist content, porn etc? Is it just YouTube or any site with user generated content like forums? What about illegal content? Who gets to decide what’s illegal? Is YouTube the law enforcement on YouTube or do we need to go through courts to take down content that’s potentially illegal?

Slippery slopes go both ways.

Do you have an opinion on any of these questions? Or are you just implying that the world is so complicated that no one should make any decisions about anything?

My opinion is a private entity like youtube should be able to choose what goes on their platform. We're free to criticize of course, and not use their product if we choose. But they have the right to not host content they don't agree with.

I'm not sure "legitimate public debate" is warranted in this case. Too many people who are not qualified think they have "done their own research" and come to conclusions causing real harm to other people.

Even MDs are not necessarily well-suited to make expert opinions on pandemics and vaccine technology and such. A lot of MDs are qualified to diagnose conditions and recommend treatment and prescription medication... that doesn't mean they should act like they know more than people who specialize in infectious diseases.

The place for "debate" of the effectiveness and safety of vaccines is peer-reviewed studies, not YouTube videos.

There is a certain legitimate distrust at this point over the lab leak issue. That's because of those two papers published in I believe Nature and the Lancet claiming that the evidence strongly supported a natural origin theory; those papers have now been discredited and some of the authors have deleted their Twitter accounts after exposure of their own emails that questioned natural origin theories due to anomalies in the viral sequence. That's very suspicious behavior for 'peer-reviewed research'.

So you're saying the system works?

The lab leak is still not known or accepted by the wider public. Even after vanity fairs write up.

1) The papers shouldn't have made it through any kind of honest peer-review process.

2) The papers to my knowledge have not been formally retracted, which is what normally happens after a peer-reviewed report is discredited.

So, not working very well.

The problem is that legitimate public debate has been fully warranted within the context of the pandemic response already - see the initial WHO recommendations not to close borders (closing borders was effective), the failure of the WHO to give useful advice about masks (even cotton ones worn without a tight seal work to a degree), and the failure of the media to accurately represent scientific consensus on whether there was a lab leak (it's very hard to find strong evidence either way).

There seems to be a common pattern where the media gets something wrong, scientists in the field aren't able to call it out, and there's a fairly long wait until someone has the visibility and credentials to point out the mistake. Banning discussion from more and more platforms could make it harder to correct real mistakes.

On the other hand, "do your own research" clearly doesn't work out well for a lot of people. I have no idea how to balance the competing factors. Maybe we have to accept some legitimate debate will be stifled by platforms, or maybe this is a problem for scientists themselves to solve.

While scientists have revised their advice in varying ways over the course of the pandemic, I would argue amateur armchair doctors have not been useful in that practice.

Also, some of your statements ignore context: Mask recommendations weren't withheld because they were believed to not be effective, but because there was a massive run on masks and the hoarding by people who didn't even yet need them was impacting the ability for health providers to get them in hospitals. Once cloth masks especially were plentiful and the supply of medical masks adjusted, the recommendations changed.

Public individuals trying to get ahead of the recommendations to put themselves ahead of the public good in that situation caused more harm than not.

The lab leak hypothesis has no bearing on public health, discussion of it right now serves political drama only. Investigation of causes and prevention of future pandemics is important... for the experts. I don't think it should be brought up in public circles at all.

The context was omitted for brevity, not ignored. It wasn't necessary to rehash the fine details of each example.

Have the WHO stated they deliberately withheld advice on masks to preserve PPE for healthcare workers? What you're talking about was one commonly held belief for why they did it, but a simple failure to give advice under conditions of uncertainty would also explain it.

The lab leak hypothesis absolutely has a bearing on public health in the future. You're right that even if the virus was leaked we can't unleak it, but debate about gain-of-function research and the safety standards of virology is critical to preventing future pandemics.

Can you go into detail about what harm public individuals caused?

> The lab leak hypothesis absolutely has a bearing on public health in the future. You're right that even if the virus was leaked we can't unleak it, but debate about gain-of-function research and the safety standards of virology is critical to preventing future pandemics.

I think you missed my point: There's no point to public discussion. Governments, health departments, infectious disease specialists, should all be determining the source of COVID-19, and if someone was at fault, making changes to prevent it.

But the public discussing their conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19 is solely there to drum up political drama about China, and move discussion from science into politics.

> Can you go into detail about what harm public individuals caused?

Beyond the massive additional spread of COVID-19 itself because of people refusing to take basic safety precautions like masking or social distancing, or refusing to get vaccinated based on dubious claims by people who know nothing about medical science, now we've got people actively poisoning themselves by taking "remedies" that people have come up with which have no basis in reality.

...When I picked up heartworm prevention for my dog today at the vet, I had to laugh that there are probably people trying to get their hands on it to "cure" their COVID-19.

Going back to the original point, public[0] discussion is vital for calling out other public discussion that's incorrect. We don't live in a world where the only people talking about covid are immunologists. Bodies like the WHO are subject to political considerations, the media approach covid from the angle of their existing biases, and that introduces a lot of potential for them to be totally wrong - as we saw in the original examples I gave.

[0] For a given value of "public" that only includes people who know what statistical significance is, read research papers, and don't confidently tell people to take antimalarials and dewormers on the basis of single studies with a low sample size.

"I think you missed my point: There's no point to public discussion. Governments, health departments, infectious disease specialists, should all be determining the source of COVID-19, and if someone was at fault, making changes to prevent it."

Is that not naive though? Without public discussion and pressure these entities would very likely sweep everything under the rug in the interest of their own careers, etc.

I think you'd have to be extremely cynical to believe there aren't informed parties with a vested interest in uncovering the truth. Obviously the United States would be very interested in knowing if misconduct in China created an extremely deadly and costly pandemic. Public health officials, believe it or not, probably mostly act in the interests of public health. And in the scenarios where systems fail, real journalists with a moral and ethical responsibility to responsible reporting should fill the gap... not crazy people running their own blog.

>Mask recommendations weren't withheld...

Withheld? That's not how I remember it.

>"There's no reason to be walking around with a mask," infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/preventing-coronavirus-facemask...

I woulb be surprised if even 1% of the videos being pulled out are moderate voices, but that's the price of moderation, in order to enjoy any freedom you need to stay alive but if you get killed by disinformation you lose them all, so in such cases as this one moderation of mass communication channels is the lesser evil even if a few reasonable people get their content pulled out.

Let's kill them all and God will choose the good ones!

Let's disinformation roam free in the land of the poorly educated so it can kill them? That doesn't seem very nice.

I think America has a very serious problem right now accepting that personal liberties, while important, need to not deride public welfare. It's like the entire nation has taken it's anti-anything-socialized fervor to an extreme level and is now becoming self-destructive. During a pandemic it is unacceptable that prominent national politicians vocally fight against societal welfare but that's where we're at.

I'm looking at you guys from up here in Canada where there were some CPC (Conservative Party of Canada) candidates who are still openly anti-vax and the party leader took a lot of shit on the public stage for failing to stamp out their voices. The PPC (People's Party of Canada) by comparison is openly anti-vax and did secure a big chunk of voters (I'd assume the vast majority of anti-vaxers) but again failed to win even the party leader's seat and the GPC (Green Party of Canada) had their turnout decline staunchly after a combination of weak leadership and continued ambiguity over vaccine passport rollout. No where on the main stage except for the PPC (which failed to qualify for the debates) was there any voice actually advocating against vaccination.

This is I think why America has a real problem that the entire world is getting their civil liberties curtailed in order to address. The country needs to get its house in order - it is unacceptable that mask mandate prevention laws have been passed by governors that might legitimately consider a presidential run next year. This is a crisis that needs to be addressed seriously and overcome and at this point governments in the rest of the world are losing their ability to keep order internally because of how fractured the nation has got.

It absolutely sucks that it has come to this - but the domestic government in the US has not been acting competently. Even with both sides of the aisle have technically worked together you still have the BS "We're not going to side with them" crap going on. America has a long, long history of severely curtailing civil liberties - if you think this sort of an action is new I would direct you to one of the most regretful legal frameworks ever issued - the Sedition Act of 1918.

Get vaccinated and get your friends and family vaccinated - get those numbers up so you can be a world leader again.

Can you point me to the specific sections of the PPC platform that are anti-vaxx?

Are you sure you're not conflating anti-vaccine-passport with anti-vaccine?

The ones that conflate people who are anti-vaccine-passport with anti-vaxers in general are usually doing it deliberately.

No I think it's quite fair to view the PPC platform as anti-vaxx - the PPC has openly rejected provincial mask mandates and embraced disinformation. Bernier himself has avoided making any direct statements but he has surrounded himself with virulent anti-vaxxers.

So... you totally avoided the question. I wasn't asking about mask mandates, or who their leader has surrounded (or not surrounded) himself with.

I was asking about anti-vaccine components of their platform.

Can you point me toward any?

Or were you just speculating?

The PPC is essentially the party of Bernier right now - no PPC MP has ever been elected (though they did take home 5% of the popular vote this election). As such the personal actions of Bernier is really all we've got to go on - so I don't believe it's particularly irrelevant, though I won't dispute that it is quite vague and not at all definitive.

I wouldn't blame YouTube here. I would blame the anti-vaxxers. They created an impossible atmosphere for youtube to navigate.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Anti-vaxxer is a pejorative word, it lumps people together in ways that aren't fair. Many were just skeptical and wanted to discuss and debate the evidence, and that was ridiculed, as evident everywhere in this thread.

> I think we have to ask

No we don't. The question we have to ask is whether allowing this content is worse for society than any stifling of moderate voices.

And the answer is obviously yes. Covid-hoaxers represent millions of people who are causing a national health crisis that doesn't need to be happening anymore. Fuck moderate voices who are "just asking questions". They can deal with playing a little less devil's advocate, and getting more in board with the obvious health benefits of vaccination.

Hard agree. I've had it with moderate voices on this issue, it's a matter of life and death. Would we not push someone out of the way of an oncoming train? Do we not have lights, gates, and bells that ring when a train is going to come through? Should we take those down, and just leave it up to each individual and their opinion? Fuck their idiotic opinions.

A pandemic is a natural disaster akin to a forest fire. Once a disease reaches pandemic level there is very little that can be done to control or extinguish it. There is no going back to before no matter how hard we try.

So, we learn how to live with a new disease without letting fear dictate our behavior.

What does that statement even mean? So we walk into the path of the speeding train? We have at this point billions of data points showing that these vaccines save your life. Refusal to use them is both illogical and irrational. Their use should be globally enforced, just like MMR, Polio, and the other 30+ immunizations. Again, fuck your idiotic feelings.

It means we shouldn't fall for the promise of safety at the expense of freedom because we are afraid. Diseases are part of life like forest fires. Many totalitarian dictatorships of the past were welcomed in with thunderous applause because they promised to keep the population safe.

The promise of safety from infection is not something than any human can guarantee. The COVID vaccine does not prevent infection and does not stop the spread. The desire to force people to take a vaccine in the name of population safety is rooted in fear. Fear leads to the fearful cheering when the police beat someone for not wearing a mask. Fear leads to the fearful begging for a "leader" to keep them safe at all cost. Fear is used by megalomaniacs to expand their power and control. We should not be fearful.

This is not a slippery slope. Enforcement of basic health standards does not lead logically to some kind of fascist state. If anything, we are currently all victims of the forces of anti-science and anti-civilization. I had Chicken Pox when I was young, and I survived, although my fever went to 105 degrees F. My sons both skipped that particular disease. Good for them! This is called progress, and it does not lead automatically to Brave New World. You need to read more Heinlein, and less Internet.

> causing a national health crisis that doesn't need to be happening anymore

This just isn't true, it's never going away and nothing can stop it, this is it for the rest of your life. It'll get less deadly over time but you will get covid at some point in your life and you will get it again and again as it mutates over the years. Same with flu it was initially deadly, now it's just bad but it's never going away.

This is a very dangerous slope, especially because you are so willing to dismiss the conversation under the assumption that you know best/everything.

Indeed. Such hubris is on the rise these days and simular sentiment has been casually expressed many times throughout this thread.

STFU is not going to work to build trust in government and medical institutions. Frankly, believing it will is one of the reasons why things go downhill these days. "My way or the highway" has never really done anything good to make people understand eachother. I hear that you are frustrated, but your attitude is not going to help anyone except yourself.

Honestly, in a world where wackos will take the smallest soundbite they agree with from a moderate legitimate discussion, blow it out of proportion and weaponize it... It's hard to imagine this move by Google as overall bad. It's definitely heartbreaking, but so is the fact that a 3rd of the world is refusing to help out with solving the pandemic.

I honestly have no idea which move has an overall higher cost for society. Yet, we can't keep incentivizing wackos by giving them a platform or there'll keep being more and more of them.

Free speech, amplified to a wide audience is clearly having a negative impact on society and on out ability to be compassionate as a society. Maybe this is a step in the right direction.

Only time will tell but it's far to early to criticize the move. Especially when without it, wackos are gaining agency.

The main problem is that you think you need open discussion and public debates on this topic. You don't. That is not a movie or a painting, it's science. You need research, proof, scrutiny. This is a job and it's done by professionals.

Moderate voices, voices of reason, voices you like, voices you don't like, opinions, ... are irrelevant, useless, not needed, and just add noise. This noise, in all its forms and shapes is detrimental to the only thing that really matters and has value - what the actual researchers and scientists are communicating back to the public.

Opinions, wish-beliefs, convictions are something Reality doesn't concern itself with.

Think of it that way - when the plane is falling due to some technical problem, will you open facebook to scout for opinions and rally support, or will you just sit you bottom down and do as you're told by the cabin crew? What about during some surgical procedure - are you going to pop open a youtube stream so that your followers can judge and guide the surgeon?

Anyway, too late, too little. Damage has been done. And it's not really youtube or the social network's faults. Even without them, stupidity would find another way to make itself visible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com