It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know.
I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries (I've paid this more earnest attention than most people this glib at least) — most people, I think correctly for the most part, regard the nu-antivax thing that came about during covid to basically be the realm of internet weirdos and agitators.
I didn't have to wait at all. There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room.
The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not. There is no such thing as zero risk in medicine. When you claim something false like that and people start to notice events that contradict your words, they will no longer trust you.
This is why the cost benefit analysis must be detailed and presented clearly to people. They should make the choice of their own accord. Trying to impose it on them is how you get "anti-vaxxers" who no longer trust anything you say. I don't blame them.
This is not even a modern phenomenon. Over a century ago there was a revolt in my country over forced vaccination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt
> To eradicate smallpox, Dr. Cruz convinced the Congress to approve the Mandatory Vaccination Law on October 31, 1904, authorizing sanitary brigade workers, accompanied by police, to enter homes and apply the vaccine by force.
Thromboembolic events are a common side effect of COVID-19, and vaccine roll out often led to infection surges as the sense of normality returned before full immunity.
Thrombotic complications are frequent in COVID-19 and contribute significantly to mortality and morbidity
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32857878/
One of the special characteristics of this disease is that it may predispose patients to thrombotic disease both in the venous and arterial circulation.
Given both the vaccine and the virus can cause myocarditis or pericarditis, and given that the only thing they have in common is the spike protein, I'm curious as to where you think I went wrong.
So that is a failure of the same kind of logic that you're trying to employ. You have a virus with a clotting issue and a vaccine with a clotting issue, and they both only share the spike protein, and we know for certain now that isn't the mechanism.
And that cardiac events in both cases are a minor part of the greater effects and dangers of catching the disease.
So it's about not focusing on the wrong things
Do you have a citation or evidence for that statement? Estimates for cardiac vaccine injury are in the 4-5% range. Your statement would imply that 40% of people infected with Covid would have cardiac issues. The evidence in low vaccine rate countries (or Africa) contradict your statement (no where near 40% of the population is getting cardiac issues).
I'm not sure I believe that.
> The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference.
The public may be uneducated but they're still equipped with brains capable of pattern recognition.
In my country, the public saw young famous people "mysteriously" dying of heart attacks and strokes immediately after getting vaccinated, in some cases not long after tweeting some insults at skeptics. People are watching and they are going to connect dots.
I have a little collection of screenshots of people who suffered such a fate... It's unfortunate really.
As an aside, naming phenomena after priests / politicians like that can't possibly be productive. It's telling the outgroup (people who admire Cain) that they are worthy of contempt instead of addressing their object level concerns and misunderstandings.
This sort of high handed paternalism is exactly the attitude that has destroyed faith in institutions.
> It's obvious the messaging landed on was chosen was to maximize the individual choice to vaccinate as that was reasoned to the best possible outcome for all.
This is inducing people to pick the choice you consider correct. This is unethical in the medical profession. Ethical conduct is to present the facts and let the patient decide. You don't "maximize" any outcome, nor do you "reason" about anything on behalf of the patient. To do so means you are prioritizing concerns other than your patient's best interests and once they figure this out you are done.
If necessary, you can and must use simpler language to help them understand complex concepts. What you cannot do is decide for them in advance and then misrepresent facts in order to manufacture consent for the intervention you favor.
Not really. You'd be surprised how many people believe that. They need to make informed choices. The way to do that is to say "the benefits are X and the risks are Y". If they have trouble understanding X or Y, you do whatever is necessary to help them understand.
What you don't do is say "Oh COVID-19 vaccines? Yeah, go ahead, nothing to worry about, they're completely safe". It's not up to you to determine that they are safe, the patient makes that judgement. One person might consider them safe, another might not.
> since everyone is smart enough to make their own choice
They don't have to be "smart enough" to make choices. Unless they are mentally impaired to the point of dependence on a legal representative, they have the autonomy to decide about any matter regarding their own bodies. Even if they are uneducated. They could refuse it simply because they don't like vaccines or even you personally and it's your duty to respect that.
Unless the patient is literally dying right in front of you, there is no case you could make for overriding their will on any medical treatment, and even that varies by nation.
> so why be upset about it?
Because it's unethical and undermines trust. When you do this, people notice. They immediately stop trusting you and start actively resisting you instead. As is their right as human beings with freedom and autonomy.
> when exactly where they lied to if you claim they're smart enough to dissect the nuance?
It's still a lie. Detecting the lie does not somehow invalidate the fact it is a lie.
People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted.
This, and the fact that social media sites bow to Government pressure for this sort of moderations, is what's alarming to many reasonable people.
Do you have any non-vague examples? I saw those questions debated heavily throughout the pandemic and nobody was “deplatformed” for it.
This makes me curious whether there’s other context important to understanding what happened — and why the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects.
Jay Battacharya[1][2] of the Great Barrington Declaration fame - is he a usual case? From [3]:
> In October 2020, Collins criticized the Great Barrington Declaration's "focused protection" herd immunity strategy, calling it "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment." In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said that "There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises". The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused Collins of "work[ing] with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration." and of "Shut[ting] Down Covid Debate".
Here's a bit more from the WSJ article[4] mentioned:
> In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
From a recent interview in Unherd[5]:
> And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic.
> That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022.
Maybe deplatforming is not the same as having your Twitter account meddled with but it seems similar enough. There's also Martin Kulldorf[6][7]:
> Was Martin Kulldorff also on the Trends Blacklist?
> He had been, actually. His first placement on the trends blacklist was in July of 2020, when he was advocating for opening schools… He told me that what he was doing on Twitter was: whenever someone was mentioning that schools should close, he would post a link to the Swedish study that showed that when schools had opened in spring of 2020, no children had died and very few teachers had gotten sick relative to other workers in the population. He posted over and over and over, he said, and was more active on Twitter than at any other time. That’s exactly when the trends blacklist was applied on him, in July 2020. And then again, three more times in 2022. Although there was no active trends blacklist for Martin at the moment.
> Is it still active for you?
> It was still active when I was at Twitter. I hope it’s been removed. My tweets seem to go more viral nowadays.
Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is a biostatistician, epidemiologist and (edit: was until 2021) professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya
[2] https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins#NIH_director
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barr...
[5] https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff
[7] https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...
How did he get into the "usual suspects" box?
> it’s worth remembering that despite lying about the severity of the disease
He wasn't just wrong or mistaken (if he was) or providing a different view, he was lying. That must be how he got into that box. I presume you have some sort of evidence, given such a bold claim?
> pushing myths about herd immunity
Would you care to give an example of that too? As I understand it, he was pushing the conventional line, conventional up until this pandemic, at least.
> Twitter chose not to have their company amplify his voice but his followers and organic discovery were unaffected.
That isn't true. From [1]:
> Actually, it’s a set of tools that include locking users out of searches and preventing some users’ tweets from trending—which is how countless other users discover what’s popular or being talked about on Twitter.
> “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter employee told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed this.
and from the Unherd interview I provided above:
> What I understand is that my Twitter messages can reach people who directly follow me. But they have no chance of being put on a broader visibility setting, so that people who don’t follow me would see my messages.
That means "organic discovery" is severely limited. I wonder if you would consider a hellban to be deplatforming or not.
> I wonder if you would consider a hellban to be deplatforming or not.
I would consider it something which didn’t happen to him. Being blocked from trending based on his history of bad advice may not be something you like but it‘s nowhere near deplatforming unless you’re defining that term as meaning that you don’t get free promotion.
You're being too coy. Which industry and which paper? I'm not sure what's preventing you from being more specific, especially since you were lamenting vague examples earlier.
> unless you’re defining that term as meaning that you don’t get free promotion.
So if you can seemingly access a service but not be provided that service then you haven't been deplatformed? That sounds a lot like being given a telephone and a dial tone but you can only call out to prearranged numbers and meanwhile no one can call in nor find out your number and yet the phone company claims they're not denying you service. In other words, preposterous.
I would say they lumped themselves. Even the worst grifters know how to cloak their schemes in language of "free inquiry" and "skepticism" and so on. If the true skeptics do nothing at all to distinguish themselves from the grifters, that's on them. None of us are mind readers.
How could one make such a distinction? The key is that a true skeptic is not the same as a true believer in some alternative theory. A true skeptic will follow the scientific method - identifying specific flaws, being open to discussion of experiments to resolve open questions, citing sources that others can check, etc. Most importantly, they will apply the same level of skepticism to alternatives or to other topics. A true believer, on the other hand, will push their own theory with weak evidence, weak connections, and no attempt to correct those flaws even as they're relentless in criticizing others. When you look past the whitewash of "all voices [but effectively only their own] deserve to be heard" rhetoric, it's usually not that hard to spot the difference.
Exercise for the reader: apply this method to the many comments here about "thrombo-embolic events" as an argument against vaccines (for any group or generally). How many of the people flinging that newly-learned term around are true skeptics, and how many are just reflexive contrarians?
The ‘signal’ of a people who are genuinely asking questions or voicing concerns is drowned by the ‘noise’ of charlatans, amoral self-publicists and genuine crazies.
A few weeks later an emergency law was passed and you would receive a fine if not wearing them.
Similar situation in many countries.
The rhetoric from the public about masks being simple and obvious had the same problem on the friends-and-family scale.
Which makes me wonder: with the degree of weaponization of the internet on the side of the anti-vaxxers will the next pandemic be 'the big one'? Enough people that refuse vaccination and you are looking at an entirely different probable outcome.
Here in NL a small army of foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorists did their utmost to undermine the vaccination campaign with the most outrageous claims and I'm pretty sure that we can chalk up a number of unnecessary deaths to their efforts. They wouldn't be able to tell a virus from a bacterium but that didn't stop them from spouting one nonsense theory after another and organizing (sometimes violent) protests against health care workers and their equipment.
This is a worrisome development.
I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths. But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.
Yes, the anti-vaxx (and anti-government) sentiment has received an enormous boost from this, time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question.
> I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths.
I'm partially ok with that. They really should give out a double helping of advice: one that is dumbed down for those that lack the necessary background, one that is more on the level for those interested or that do have the necessary background. As it is the dumbed down version is all we've got and the result is that it is too easy to poke holes in it.
At the same time, some of the under-preparedness would have been much harder to deal with without the occasional white lie, it stopped a lot of profiteering and kept some items in supply when otherwise there would have been a run on them.
> But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.
Yes, and fwiw I think those people should have gone to jail. We're working on a couple of those cases here NL at the moment and I'm really curious what the outcome will be.
We're about to find out, buddy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/how-polio-silently-spread-in...
Telling the truth would have resulted in far less supply shocks, instead, half the population willfully ignored the obvious lie by putting their heads in the sand and the other half ratcheted up their preparedness (because the govt clearly lying about everything at this point)
This made it rather easy to be an antivaxer, since people could just put their heads in the sand and remain blissfully ignorant of the scope of the disease. The deaths were just statistics, as were the benefits of vaccination.
I think in a more severe pandemic, where more people would be losing friends or loved ones, they wouldn't have the luxury of this ignorance and they would be lining up to get a vaccine.
I think back to the big controversies over athletes like Kyrie Irving and Novak Djokovic, and I never understood how they were a risk warranting that kind of response. That’s where the anti-anti-vaxxers look authoritarian.
So it didn't matter if people lost friends or loved ones, the political war has casualties in their minds.
Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.
In the US alone you're talking about 75K people dead under 50.
And over 50 the numbers rise rapidly.
If you want to talk about it as a rate that's fine, but the pre-vaccine risk of dying from covid for a healthy person in their 40s or 50s was probably comparable to their lifetime risk of dying in a vehicular collision, it's not a small thing.
Governments are working with private corporations to promote misinformation and silence real information and you’re worried about…anti vaxxers?
I can maybe steel man a utilitarian stance for this position though I’m afraid it’s weak to “surely the lepers won’t eat my face”.
Every centralized service will inevitably be goaded into censorship for assorted reasons. Every filter has false positives. Grifters, charlatans, and informational warfare campaigns pumped pure horse shit into our memetic stream (through our own institutions even), driving the signal well below the noise floor. Twitter attempted to filter out the hostile noise to remain useful, necessarily throwing a lot of worthwhile information out in the process.
I've never been a fan of "web 2.0" centralization, and generally believe in free communications via libre software. But spinning this most recent tempest-in-a-teapot as some watershed scandal is ridiculous. Especially in the larger context of Twitter just being bought out by an impotent strongman, who has been marketing it with a brand of "free speech" while censoring per his personal whims.
If these events are really what it took for you to start paying attention to the power centralized companies wield, then congratulations I guess? But litigating what Twitter Past did as exceptional, as if censorship isn't intrinsic to the technical foundation of the whole service, just seems like a denial mechanism that will circle you back to your previous unaware state.
"misinformation" and "real information" as rationally believed at the time or only with 20/20 hindsight? It's an important distinction. Also, what about the recommendations that did stand the test of time, or the misinformation about vaccine risks and alternative treatments that was rightly suppressed because it was false and harmful? If this is to be anything but an exercise in anti-authoritarian self-congratulation, people need to own up to their own mistakes as well.
Want to reduce the impact of anti-vax messaging? The government could stop lying and trying to suppress truthful information to start with.