Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service.
Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform.
You do not have this kind of disagreement within the professional field with bomb making materials. Pandemic prevention is an on-going research topic where a lot of different professionals has wild difference in views and approaches, and the meta studies done post the covid pandemic has also demonstrated that much of the strategies deployed by countries all over the world, including US and Sweden, was proven to be inefficient or directly false. The effectiveness of non-N95 respirator against an airborn virus that mostly spread through aerosols (rather than droplets) was one of them, and the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden demonstrated that in an early study when they found live virus surviving the filtered air conditioning in the hospital.
Some people in Sweden first learned about the US censorship because official news from the Swedish government was removed from platforms. Some fringe Covid disinformation might get people kill, but the chilling effect from liberal use of censorship will also kill people.
The biggest killer of all seems to be the politicization of pandemic research. The meta studies seems to be mostly ignored by the political discussion, and its very possible that we get a repeat of the pandemic sooner than later without any thing changing from last time.
Citation very, very much needed.
A company can generally be relied upon to act to reduce their liability in most cases. That involves not pissing off their federal regulatory bodies.
Sweden was not caught up in the early suppression of misinformation. Things changed after a certain tacolike individual called Google's CEO into a private meeting. And expecting them to ignore that, is insane.
Doesn’t section 230 protect them from the consequences of words users transmit through their platform.
N95s (and above) definitely work, so does filtered air. But sweden has a long standing history of eugenics
Is it? There were some very scathing attacks on their COVID policy back in the first two years of the pandemic, but when you look at more recent retrospectives that have the benefit of hindsight, it seems that they didn't actually do worse than countries which went full lockdown.
Let's talk it over in the open, it's not perfect but it's the best way.
Information, backed by experts, usually requires intervention by a higher power to supress - because it doesn't carry the same liability.
Is this disinformation really more dangerous than that book? Is there some reason YouTube should be more liable for user-uploaded content, versus a bookstore being liable for content they deliberately choose to carry?
In some jurisdictions, however, it does remain banned to this day. YT are liable if they broadcast the contents of the Cookbook to the UK, for example.
Which is a great example of companies acting because they'll end up liable. Which is the only point I've made.
Back this up with data if you want to keep stating this as fact. How do you know know disinformation got people killed, and what specifically are you defining as disinformation?
More importantly though, the then (and unfortunately now) president isn't a doctor and didn't directly tell people to take it. If a person heard that and decided to eat a bottle of pills meant for a fish tank, I don't know who we could lay blame on other than the person that made that choice.
Let's say for example the President keeps his yap shut about hydroxychloroquine or drinking bleach [0] etc and 10 people listening to Alex Jones die taking it because they are frightened. Now lets say POTUS goes on televised News and suggest doing dangerous things to 100 times the size of Alex Jones's audience and we end up with 1000 needless deaths of people that may not get COVID anyway. I expect Alex Jones to be an irresponsible sleaze bag but POTUS should have some restraint/intelligence.
I have no idea why people keep saying that he suggested injecting household detergents or drinking bleach or some other nonsense like that, other that parroting biased nonsense or coming up with it themselves. What's more worrying is the way it was reported as such, even though he's talking to journalists, the press conference was filmed start to finish and is freely available in several places.
This lie needs to die.
Also, if you watch earlier, the guy from Homeland goes through their experiments that show the virus does indeed die when exposed to sunlight[3]. I thought it was very interesting and instructive but the next day saw the media distorting it beyond recognition.
And this, in a thread about misinformation and disinformation.
[1] https://youtu.be/bATddhoI6gI?si=2ITmdayt4rLNLalT&t=1591
Looking at Birx face while he is making those comments indicates - to me at least - a person very uncomfortable with what is being said. If they were discussed with him before (your source of info unknown) then he clearly did not understand what was being said to him. Yes UV kills all viruses on surfaces as does bleach - it is not useful for someone already infected with COVID and neither is Hydroxychloroquine (taken internally or otherwise).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d57zJr82dhQ
Whether it is redrawing NOAA Hurricane projection maps, claiming COVID will all go away in a couple of months or cabinet members claiming vaccines have not been tested while simultaneously giving indication that taking untested remedies is ok - make it a little unclear who is MIS and DIS informing the public.
He says it in the press conference.
> The couple from Arizona would likely disagree if both were still alive - they heard what he said and acted in accordance with their interpretation.
They did something stupid, what's your point?
Attempts should be made to accurately inform people and minimize the number of people that do "something stupid" IMHO. Doing stupid things can have multiple sources - being misinformed or partially informed is one of them. Scared people often do really stupid things.
Sadly misinforming people seems to happen on a regular basis with this administration. If this had been a one off incident during a crisis it would be more understandable. Sometimes Presidents make mistakes. Telling people "what do you have to lose" is for untested drugs IMO is not responsible behavior.
The claims in the article, which is notably from very early in the pandemic, are focused mainly on looting, rioting, etc.
There are also stories of people poisoning themselves with household cleaners that they believed to be doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate.
I'm not sure how that's relevant though, they were dosing themselves with household chemicals based on what they heard from the then (and unfortunately now) president who notably has no medical background.
If a person says advil is useful for headaches and someone is harmed when they take a whole bottle, I wouldn't blame the first person for that decision and I definitely wouldn't begin to say speech should have been censored to avoid it.
You know this claim can never be substantiated right? You will never be able to show causation like that and we would never allow some controlled trial to see whether giving people whatever information you deem as misinformation actually increases the death rate relative to a control group.
I absolutely would say that we can't prove humans are the result of evolution. The theory seems very likely and explains what we have observed, but that's why its a theory and not a fact - its the last hypothesis standing and generally accepted but not proven.
My argument here isn't with whether the causation seemed likely, though we can have that debate if you prefer and we'd have to go deep down the accuracy and reliability of data reporting during the pandemic.
My argument is that we can't make blanket statements that misinformation killed people. Not only is that not a proven (or provable) fact, it skips past what we define as misinformation and ignores what was known at the time in favor of what we know today. Even if the data you to point to shows correlation and possible causation today, we didn't have that information during the pandemic st the time that YouTube was pulling down content for questioning efficacy or safety.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... gives good estimates of COVID death impact using a very reasonable methodology.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.27.22271579v... illustrates that it's hard to nail this relationship down since UNDERREPORTING was ALSO highest in countries with high vaccine skepticism.
While establishing causation is the gold standard, dismissing strong correlative relationships where everything reasonably considered conflationary has been ruled out (which a raw death count would ostensibly do much of) is not arguing in good faith, IMHO
Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate. The populations aren't controlled at all, here you are assuming the only meaningful difference in the populations are vaccination rate. Plenty of other factors could come into play; environmental differences, average health, average number of prescription drugs, preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes, etc. You can't just hand wave away any other population differences and assume that vaccination rate was the key there.
As you pointed out the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in reporting and testing. How can you skip past that and still land on misinformation caused deaths?
That is why The Economist used excess-death estimates, skipping right over the whole "death caused by COVID" vs. "death caused by comorbidity" debate. Since COVID was arguably the only worldwide difference between 2019 and the following years, a presumption that the very-statistically-significant excess deaths were largely due to COVID was thus reasonable.
Where even raw death reporting was suspect, they used reasonable estimates. They made their data and analysis public, you can analyze it yourself and counterargue, or have an AI do it these days. Hey, maybe that would be a good exercise!
> Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate
It compares countries with their own prior years first AND THEN to each other, not countries directly to other countries. This should factor anything systematic at a per-country level, out, such as average health.
Hey, I'm not saying it's flawless (does that even exist?), I was just impressed by their work here back when I last looked at this. I am generally a skeptic and enjoy critical thinking, so I do not attribute this lightly.
Excess death rates, at least in the US, are particularly interesting because they didn't follow the pattern I would have expected. Pandemics will effectively pull forward deaths, that didn't seem to happen here. Our all cause mortality spiked noticeably during the pandemic but it came back down to a more normal rate, I would have expected it to be below normal for at least a year or two. Its not as simple as pointing to all cause or excess deaths and saying it must have been vaccine hesitancy - we can't distinguish why those people died and it wouldn't explain the mortality rate after the pandemic.
As a sibling commenter pointed out, a big part of the covid disinformation that was removed at the time was by established researchers in respected institutions or countries such as Sweden whose pandemic strategy was just different from what many US state institutions implemented.
Sweden turned out to have one of the highest vaccine acceptance levels and also lowest deadliness in the disease. One cofounding factor is the purported high trust in institutions, but such trust is built on having clear and direct communication, and the perception of information being filtered for policitcal or personal career reasons can never yield rust.
Pandemic awareness is a much too complicated issue to be simplified into crazies and vaccine skeptics against everyone else.
Which is sorta why there actually is studies done on the impact of the misinformation [0].
> Following this misinformation, approximately 800 people have died, whereas 5,876 have been hospitalized and 60 have developed complete blindness after drinking methanol as a cure of coronavirus.34–37 Similar rumors have been the reported cause of 30 deaths in Turkey.38 Likewise, in Qatar, two healthy South Asian men ingested either surface disinfectant or alcohol-based hand sanitizer after exposures to COVID-19 patients.39 In India, 12 people, including five children, became sick after drinking liquor made from toxic seed Datura (ummetta plant in local parlance) as a cure to coronavirus disease.40 The victims reportedly watched a video on social media that Datura seeds give immunity against COVID-19.40
[0] https://www.ajtmh.org/view/journals/tpmd/103/4/article-p1621...
This seems like a bizarre retcon. No only did Trump fund "Operation Warp Speed" but he still (occasionally) expresses pride at funding the vaccine research. This is not "casting doubt on vaccination". I think the US right was generally doubtful of vaccination, but I'm fuzzy about whether this started before or after the vaccine mandates. Certainly I remember it being more of a phenomenon once Biden took office - perhaps as knee jerk opposition to a Democrat president.
The very first commercial I saw after Biden was sworn in was a government ad telling people to get vaccinated.
>Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service.
>Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform.
Proliferating attitudes about the restriction of communication like you are doing and advocating for is bad and gets people killed. The history books are chock f-ing full of the recipe and the steps.
I'll take my chances with the plastic explosives and the health quackery.
Even though people may spew falsehoods the truth "just is" and will keep coming back up.
Hitler and Goebbels did effectively make use of a ministry dedicated to spewing out as many falsehoods as they could, and it very effectively controlled the flow and acceptance of information in Nazi Germany.
Pol Pot and his Little Red Book empowered the Khmer Rouge, and actively buried the truth to the point where people assisted the regime to become one of the most bloody in all of history.
As Orwell warned us, because he lived through Soviet Russia and their propaganda machine, the truth does not survive when there are those dedicated to twisting it or hiding it to fit their purpose.
I wish I had your level of confidence about this. I just feel like it is not the case these days and it’s depressing.
-- Jonathan Swift, 1710 [1]
(very apt that this has an ad in the middle of it)
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=KigTAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Truth+com...
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Debunking disinfo takes significantly more energy than it did to create it, although I have no more than anecdata to back it up I have yet to find anyone who disagrees.
So, I too would like to believe that the truth prevails but imo it only does so when its champions are incredibly persistent.
If they trust bad medical advice on YouTube and die, it's their problem.
Its also a problem for the platform - who is now party to it happening.
YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube. Their safest option, is to disallow it.
YouTube censoring videos people want to see will also hurt YouTube.
The stats I've seen suggest the vast majority of people have caught COVID between 2019 and now and pretty much all the preventative measures that worked reliably were things that either individuals could do themselves or that required targeting travellers specifically.
It isn't obvious that people trusting YouTube about COVID affects any third party. Who and how are they affecting?
Nothing you do, ever, is in isolation. So nothing you do, ever, will not affect someone else. Pretending that everyone is a sole unit, to excuse behaviour, has never made sense.
People weren't listening to PhDs getting banned. They were listening to influencers get banned.
> People weren't listening to PhDs getting banned. They were listening to influencers get banned.
I'm a people, you know.
[0] https://www.ajtmh.org/view/journals/tpmd/103/4/article-p1621...
Also, you know who tends to be most in favour of "let stupid people face the consequences of their poor choices"? Those who want to profit from those people and their choices.
Do we know how many otherwise healthy children caught Covid and died from it?
My impression from the official figures is that in most countries the number is vanishingly small if not zero.
Remember that even polio only put like 1% of its victims into an iron lung
(Otherwise healthy) school-age children - and younger adults - always faced a very low risk from Covid-19, and we had solid statistical data on this from at least May 2020 onwards.
Maybe we need to look at where our decision-makers get their information, and their incentives?
Much easier just to suspect an unfounded conspiracy instead.
Maybe your username should be “empathyfail”
If you want to make an argument that an overweight child should still be considered otherwise healthy, that would be a welcome and relevant argument, and also an interesting one.
You'd close schools to protect a minority of children with comorbidities from a virus which doesn't threaten the vast majority of children, knowing that school closures will definitely damage all children?
Umm.
The flu, for example, was always a worse risk than polio, people just became fearful of polio because we found a way to save some lives in a non-ideal way, which became very visible.
> "otherwise healthy"
Yeah, not all kids are otherwise healthy. There's kids with Leukemia or whatever that are extremely immunocompromised because of chemotherapy. They have to coexist with anti-vaxxers and, believe it or not, their lives matter too.
> caught Covid
You think the anti-vaxx crazy train starts and stops at Covid? These people have been attacking MMR for much longer than Covid. Children DO die to measles, mumps, and what have you.
The absolute number.
what you call "herd immunity" is merely letting people die and then go "we have herd immunity" as part of your survivor bias
only solution that works most of the time, regardless of pathogen (including covid): air filtration (respirators and/or whole room)
After vaccination or a passed infection the immune response is there. When a sufficient immune resopnse from a large enough portion if the population is enough to lower the critical cases below some threshold, we call that type of immunity herd immunity.
It's not binary, but a useful concept nonetheless, and one that some people devote their professional lives to. It can be observed every flu season.
Regardless, herd immunity was not a serious possibility at any point (given the high Rº and lack of a vaccine that could prevent transmission), which, considering this was known very early on makes your question, again, a good one not a rhetorical one, despite your intent.
Finally, regardless of herd immunity, at risk individuals would still require vaccination, which makes the herd immunity as a goal, again, irrelevant, which is where I started. It's a nice by-product.
Though, to be fair, my whole family caught a "virus" during 2nd phase except my father but we didn't go to hospital and just bed rest for 2-3 days. My family really were skeptical of vaccine but personally I don't mind vaccines and would prefer it.
Think of the children ... :-)
...or getting infected, of course.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The current breed of mRNA vaccines targets the spike protein, and the TRIM21 gene. Some of them also attack the S protein directly.
All of them work to boost various antibodies. The "targets" are in addition. By targeting the spike protein, the attack hits the RNA of the virus, not just the protein. The entire cellular structure of the virus breaks down. The same with TRIM21 targets.
The bodies natural defences never targeted the spike protein, and instead focuses on the N-layer, not "all parts of the virus". These natural defences rarely manage to cause the viral cell to decay, they tend to work by slowing reproduction instead.