YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

People think they had COVID in the early pre-testing days, but it was just the flu or a bad cold. (My son was in this realm; severe pneumonia in early 2020, but later testing showed no antibodies.) You'd have restaurants swamped with angry "but I've already had it!" people.

Verification is hard; you can't just take word for it, so that means an antibody test, and at that point you might as well have just vaccinated them anyways while they were in.

This policy on YouTube just started, and, last I heard anyway, there are other sources of information other than YouTube.

There have obviously been many many sources of information on the internet that allow anti-vaccine information. And, if that information was actually credible, it would have also been available to, for instance, those at YouTube who made this policy. What do you figure their agenda is for covering it up?

This is a really frustrating perspective to hear.

> I heard this bogus claim about something I don't understand and wanted to know if it was true

> All I could find was doctors saying it was nonsense

> How could I know what the truth was?

I suspect it's a common form of reasoning. It's committing so many mistakes all at once.

* Refusal to acknowledge that you might be considering nonsense and thus perceiving anyone saying it's nonsense as malicious

* Complete refusal or certainty in your inability to do basic research on things that are well documented by many organizations and easy to find BUT STILL SAYING ITS HARD TO FIND

* Not just lack of trust, but certainty of distrust for authority figures. Anything they say has negative value.

It's far more upsetting to me than hearing people with malicious political agendas being assholes.

Fox and CNN are two sides of the same coin.

https://youtu.be/wmoABTiCpco

I dont understand why everyone thinks they are fascists.

Is there credible, non-censorious evidence that the vaccine reduces these particular risks? This is the same argument that we keep seeing: you have to take this vaccine because ${thing that vaccines normally do but this one hasn't been shown to do}. The most egregious example is "provide immunity"/"improve outcomes for anyone around you". I just don't believe a word of it until I see the science.

You're being downvoted but the medical industry in the US honestly has terrible PR. It's not surprising that people misunderstand.

Vaccines do grant immunity, but immunity doesn't mean "you cannot catch the virus" and it never has. It means that your immune system will recognise the virus immediately and fight it.

This is the same thing as "less symptoms".

"A week of feeling like shit" has nothing to do with the virus at all, they're not symptoms of an infection that you are feeling, they are side effects of your immune system learning to fight the virus that the vaccine is teaching it about.

All, or at least most, vaccines require occasional boosters, but if everyone is vaccinated when they should be, the virus will die out before any significant number of further infections can occur, as has now happened with Polio and Smallpox.

So in short: You were not lied to, but you absolutely should have had this explained to you with greater clarity.

The vaccine gives immunity, by the definition of what immunity is. The reduced efficacy was communicated as soon as it was confirmed. There was no lie. This is how science occurs. The best conclusion was given from the data at the time.

Regarding the metrics for vaccination rates that would allow full normalcy: they existed before the Delta variant, and unfortunately this new variant has made herd immunity impossible.

Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system. "Immunity" in the context of vaccines does not, and has never meant something like 'diplomatic immunity.' Instead, it means that a vaccinated person's body has the tools to fight off the virus. Which looks like reduced symptoms and drastically reduced likelihood of death from the virus. Mild side effects are expected. [1]

This has been true since vaccines were first discovered /invented, and will continue to be true. Measles, Smallpox, Polio, etc.

Perhaps many people misunderstood what "immunity" meant... But that initial misunderstanding doesn't mean that they were being lied to by doctors and scientists. What it really means is that they were unintentionally lying to themselves about the definition of immunity.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/why-vaccinate/vaccine-d...

Please look up the medical definition of immunity.

In a world without Delta, the vaccines did do an incredible job of actually preventing infection. "Effectiveness [against confirmed infection] remained above 95% regardless of age group, sex, race, or presence of comorbidities."[1] But that study used data up to March 2021, which means mostly non-Delta variants. Against Delta, vaccine effectiveness in preventing infection might be closer to 50%+ (e.g. [2]) -- which is still very effective! It's just not effective as we would like. "Hi, here's a shot that cuts your odds of getting infected in half. Do you want it?" Um, yes please.

You have to change your behavior when the facts in the world change. The messaging had to change with the facts. Of course you can't use the old vaccination thresholds for re-opening if the virus is now infecting 10x (50% vs. 95%) as many vaccinated people as it was 2 months ago, that doesn't make sense.

The virus moved the goalposts. You can be angry about that, but that's reality.

We are so lucky that despite everything, the vaccines are still incredibly effective at keeping you from dying if you get COVID. I'm actually very angry at how the mask messaging was handled (there should absolutely be consequences for that), but it doesn't matter how angry I am, if I don't get vaccinated I am irrationally refusing the single best way to avoid dying in this pandemic.

[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-1577 [2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e4.htm

The world changed between the beginning of vaccine availability and today. New variants emerged from unvaccinated populations and some of those variants (Delta being the most prominent currently being reported) are able to evade the immune response generated by the vaccine (breakthrough infections). The guidance was updated to reflected newly available information -- would you prefer that the CDC ignore new data and just stick with its initial statements?

The reason we are far from normalcy is that since the beginning of this pandemic people have been refusing to do what they need to do to slow the spread. If people had done what health officials asked, we might have been closer to normalcy. Take your complaints to all those right-wing extremists in the media and the government who politicized a public health crisis and who continue to tell people to ignore the CDC.

This claim is egregiously false itself. Several RCTs have been done for early exposure to covid or for prophylaxis.

Just out of memory I remember studies for HCQ prophylaxis (doesn’t work), remdesivir prophylaxis (does work), and monoclonal antibody prophylaxis (does work).

The lies created by anti vaccine activists are already spread widely and apparently convinced you these studies which happened didn’t happen.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/22/remdesivir-reduces-covid...

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/regen-co...

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638

And here is a study which looks at viral load since days of symptom onset, showing that at the 72 hour mark there is still plenty of Covid-19 in the body: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5

I am not a medical expert, so there may be things to criticize about these studies. All I meant to point out is that people are looking into / have looked at the questions you raise. Doctors and nurses are pretty burnt out; I for one think that they'd be looking for prophylactic treatments.

The PDF seems to be a controversial article to both sides of viewpoints of the covid19 pandemic treatment by various governments.

Thanks for bringing this up, it's something that everyone should be able to agree is unacceptable. I feel naive for asking, but WHY does the public allow politicians to get away with this hypocrisy? (eg. https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-politics/article/London-Bree...)

Once the situation changed and everyone needed to wear a mask he said that folks should go out and buy masks (and after the supply gap was closed a bit).

“In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”

In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.

Hard as it may be to hear, he said, he believes that it may take close to 90 percent immunity to bring the virus to a halt — almost as much as is needed to stop a measles outbreak.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...

Wired was one of the publications that did an interesting article about this: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

That's interesting - and must be a hospital issue. My hospital never made such a claim. They were simply upfront with their reason: There was a shortage of masks, and they were being reserved for those who needed to treat COVID-19 patients.

I keep hearing people say this as if saying it enough makes it true (thanks, Stalin), but I don't remember ever hearing it, honestly.

Do you have any footage of this? If it was as widespread as claimed, it should be easy to find.

> Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a news conference Monday to discuss adverse reactions related to the COVID vaccines — giving individuals who have been “repeatedly ignored” by the medical community a platform to share their stories ... “We are all pro-vaccine,” Johnson said at the onset of the news conference. In fact, Johnson has had every flu shot since the Swine flu, is current on all of his vaccines ... he has not had a COVID vaccine because he already had COVID.

> Five people from across the U.S., including a 12-year-old girl who was part of the Pfizer clinical trial, joined the conference at the federal courthouse ... Among them was Maddie de Garay from Ohio who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial when she was 12. On Jan. 20, Maddie received her second dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial for 12- to 15-year-olds and is now in a wheelchair ... “Why is she not back to normal? She was totally fine before this,” said Stephanie de Garay, Maddie’s mother. She volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial “to help everyone else and they’re not helping here. Before Maddie got her final dose of the vaccine she was healthy, got straight As, had lots of friends and had a life.”

> ... Upon receiving the second shot, Maddie immediately felt pain at the injection site and over the next 24-hours developed severe abdominal and chest pain, de Garay said at the press event. Maddie told her mother it felt like her heart was being ripped out through her neck, and she had painful electrical shocks down her neck and spine that forced her to walk hunched over ... She developed gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure, memory loss, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, seizures, verbal and motor tics, menstrual cycle issues, lost feeling from the waist down, lost bowel and bladder control and had an nasogastric tube placed because she lost her ability to eat.

> ... Johnson argued that while most people don’t suffer significant side effects following vaccination, he is concerned about “that small minority that are suffering severe symptoms.”

80-min video of news conference: https://rumble.com/vj5xbf-senator-ron-johnson-milwaukee-news...

The more we know about the statistical minority who suffer severe adverse reactions, the better we can screen vaccine recipients to prevent these injuries.

Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?

> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?

What censorship? I heard about it quite early.

> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?

Did the news media label it, or were they reporting on people who were labeling it?

> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.

AFAIK, there were lack of resources to test. Once the resources became available, testing was widespread.

That... wasn't the claim.

The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.

This was roughly contemporaneous with guidance that most people should eliminate all non-essential contact with people outside their household. Masking for essential interactions was recommended by the same people advising against buying masks more generally.

> ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.

It wasn't a lie, and preserving stocks for frontline workers and their essential interactions was an overtly cited part of the rationale, alongside the lack of additional benefit from superfluous masking.

> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?

That didn't happen.

> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?

The initial US travel bans, instituted after substantial domestic community spread was known and after substantial spread in lots of other foreign places that were not targeted by the bans was also known were, if not racist per se, more political posturing than public health.

> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.

How is that a lie? Whether or not it (or the actual limit on testing, which was more nuanced) was the optimum way of managing limited testing resources may be a valid debate, but it's not a lie.

Up through roughly April-May 2020, many, if not most, epidemiologists and virologists believed that masks would not help the situation: they thought respiratory viruses were spread through large droplets produced by symptomatic individuals and that physical separation, sanitation, and behavior would work as well as trying to convince people to were useful masks consistently and correctly.

After that time, reports began to appear showing coronavirus could be spread asymptomatically, by normal breathing and speech, in an aerosol form that could stay airborne for long times. Under those situations, masks are the only solution.

The "ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers" thing was mostly a response to "but it couldn't hurt" thinking.

"Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited.

"Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too.

"I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case.

"I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved."

"I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)

Our World In Data is a great source for this and other covid-related data for the world and individual countries.

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

My Wife, a ICU RN+CCRN spent most of her 2020 on the COVID floor. It was pretty brutal for her.

She has coworkers, of equal status, who experienced pandemic alongside her first hand - who were extremely hesitant to get the vaccine. This includes several months after the initial rollout to staff.

I have medical professionals in my family. Your statement sums it up. In my experience, physical/occupational therapists are the most likely to believe in crazy stuff (from a medical standpoint). RNs come next. I'm sure there are people in between on that spectrum, but I don't interact with them much.

According to the most recent data from the CDC (https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html), 960 out of every 160,000 Americans has been hospitalized due to covid (this is across all people regardless of vaccination status).

So there is _at least_ a 99% reduction in the rate of hospitalizations for the fully vaccinated, according to the figures he cited.

The message he's sending is that even if you are vaccinated, _you're not safe_. Why is this an effective message for persuading those who might still be convinced?

Is the overall outcome better than if our political leadership continued to transparently emphasize vaccine safety and outcomes, rather than scoring points with their political base? You convince more people to become vaccinated by being convincing. When you get more people vaccinated, you save more lives.

If someone's position is, that it doesn't matter if the overall outcome is worse, because the bad outcomes are more concentrated in selfish/stupid/red-state people, then I simply disagree with that.

My ex girlfriend is the exact same as you. I called her out on it, she didn’t like that. Do what you like, but IMO what you are doing is dishonest.

She did eventually get it, though, for no other reason than: it’s harmless, and it’s easier and cheaper than doing a test before every concert she wanted to go to. She eventually apologized and said she was just being stubborn for the hell of it.

Ah well, people change.

That's nice. unfortunately the world as it is is categorically providing practical counterexamples to this.

This is a tech based forum, surely everyone here has experience with a boss who complains that he’s paying you when the system never breaks, not knowing that it’s not breaking because of active measures being taken to prevent it

Anecdotally, I have never heard anyone make the argument "no one can ever get covid again" nor heard of a school being closed because "a person got near a person with COVID".

It is overly generous to speak of "one side" as if there is another equally valid side to compare with. The CDC is not a political institution and they always cite published research in their guidance and public statements about COVID-19. The anti-mask/anti-vax crowd are going around spreading one fantasy after another, coming up with new and ever more outrageous conspiracy theories and excuses for refusing to cooperate; none of their claims have ever been based in reality, and that is why the story changes on a daily basis and why there are so many contradictory claims being made.

To put this in perspective, the high-level direction of the CDC's guidance has, since the very beginning of the pandemic, been to reduce the rate at which COVID spreads; the changes in their guidance have been about the details. The anti-mask/anti-vax crowd has gone from denying that there is a virus to saying that the virus is no worse than the flu to claiming that masks would suffocate them to whining about how mask mandates violate to their freedom and that they would rather die of COVID than comply with a mask mandate. They went from heaping praise on the last President simply because he was in office when the vaccines were first becoming available to complaining that the current President was being given too much credit for the vaccination effort to claiming that the vaccine is made from aborted fetuses, that the vaccine alters DNA, that Bill Gates inserted microchips into the vaccine, that the vaccine causes people to become magnetized, and that vaccine mandates are proof that the vaccine is the "mark of the beast."

So far the playbook seems to have been:

1) Flatten the curve: Use lockdowns, masks and social distancing measures to maintain a situation where hospitals can still cope. This is not a one-time goal, it's an ongoing effort: As long as there was no vaccine, "no significant transmission right now" does not mean everything is back to normal - because if measures are lifted, transmission can quickly increase and become critical again.

2) Because the situation in 1) seriously sucks for everyone, try to come up with solutions to end the pandemic permanently (or at least make it permanently nonthreatening for the health system so we can leave "pandemic mode" and treat it as an ordinary disease). So far the most obvious strategy for this is vaccination - hence the increasing push to get everyone vaccinated.

3) Evolutionary pressures on the virus might cause the vaccines to become less effective. This unfortunately calls into question whether 2) is really able to bring an end to the pandemic. If this is really the case, then new plans are needed, such as boosters, new vaccines, I don't know. This stuff is currently being figured out.

1) and 2) does not seem like "moving the goalposts" to me. The goals were the same since the beginning of the pandemic, though of course the situation and circumstances were changing (you can only keep up a lockdown for so long, vaccines changed from "vague hope" to "viable strategy", etc)

3) is a new development that was apparently somewhat unexpected (I remember the virus was being talked about as relatively mutation resistant, which evidently wasn't the case.) - but this was simply new knowledge and new developments that might require a change in strategy - the overall goal to get out of this mess (by either eradicating covid or make it nonthreatening) did not change IMO.

Of course if this goal turns out to be permanently unarchievable, the goalpost shifting might start...

If I die, I cease to exist. So, while from the standpoint of the pre-death me, it is very unfortunate, the post-death me is either a null or an ephemeral entity in a different dimension (depending on which of the belief systems works)

Remaining in the same spatial domain but set back into oblivion by my own choices is about as close to the definition of hell as it can get.

In 7th or 8th grade, I remember watching a video in health class that included a (presumably fictional) dramatization where a kid died his first time trying marijuana because (unbeknownst to him) it had been laced with crack cocaine. It was difficult to take much of health class seriously after seeing that video.

If your audience doesn't have much background in your subject matter, they're still able to spot lazy arguments. They know they're unable to judge the merits of the rest, but the lazy arguments spoil the whole message. Many times, lazy arguments are less damaging when the audience has the necessary background to evaluate everything being said.

Maybe these stories are put out by the AP? I'm in Lincoln, NE. Omaha is an hour a way. And these exact stories will run in both local papers the exact same day.

Feels... slimy.

Here is a typical study purportedly showing evidence for long COVID:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/28/covid-37-of-pe...

Anxiety is the most common symptom of long COVID.. All of the symptoms listed could be psychosomatic, due to fear around COVID.

Not to mention the prescribed two week isolation that is part of the standard of care for even an asymptomatic COVID infecion, which could have a profound negative impact on physical and mental health, given what is known about the health risks of isolation.

Not enough attention is paid to the dangers of over-reacting to COVID:

https://twitter.com/PandaTribune/status/1440192783260655618?...

>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"

With regard to vaccines, my personal opinion is that they will prove to pose an extroardinarily low risk of producing a severe adverse effect, orders of magnitude lower than that posed by COVID.

People worry about vaccines not being tested for long term effects but covid is also not tested for long term effects. We can use common sense to deduce long term effects.

What we do know already is that COVID is not a retrovirus, so it doesn't have a genetic impact on cells that outlives the infection. We also know that the infection lasts a few weeks, then is cleared from the body.

Similarly, none of the vaccines change cell DNA, so will not have a genetic impact that outlives the vaccination's immediate post administration effects.

Therefore we can deduce that the only long-term impact of the COVID vaccines, and COVID, is from the damage done during the few days of immune response to the vaccine antigens, and few weeks when the COVID infection is active, respectively, and thus that the severity of the immediate-vaccine-response/infection can be expected to be proportional to the risk of long-term complications (i.e. long-term effects of vaccines, or long-COVID). So any vaccine that poses an extremely low risk of producing a severe immediate adverse effect, or any demographic which faces an extremely low risk of facing serious symptoms and death from COVID, should also face an accordingly low risk of long-term complications.

With vaccines, there is also the risk of 'antibody-dependent enhancement of virus infection', but so far, that hasn't manifested in any of the COVID vaccines.

Low energy

Headaches

Upset stomach, including diarrhea, constipation, and nausea

Aches, pains, and tense muscles

Chest pain and rapid heartbeat

Insomnia

Frequent colds and infections

Loss of sexual desire and/or ability

Nervousness and shaking, ringing in the ear, cold or sweaty hands and feet

Dry mouth and difficulty swallowing

Clenched jaw and grinding teeth

Sounds like all of the physical symptoms of so-called long-COVID.

So you're not a virologist or epidemiologist then? Got it.

> and I am sorry to break the news to you. Vaccinations won't make corona go away. I fact it may force it to adapt faster.

The virus spreads more rapidly among and lives for longer inside the unvaccinated, as a result getting much more exposure to human immune systems, and thus giving it more opportunity to evolve.

"Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine...

Can you name one test that was mandatory for other vaccines, but skipped for the COVID vaccines?

That's not a goalpost that got shifted. We have standards for both normal approvals and emergency use authorizations. Both were followed for the vaccines (which got EUAs followed by, in some cases/uses, full approval.)

> The Covid vaccines were fast tracked and unleashed untested

No, they weren't, vaccine candidates were developed within a few weeks of sequencing the virus and basically the entire time between then and release was spent in clinical trials.

> accompanied by a notification of the major risks inherent in this approach, like for example, perhaps the viral spike protein was causing all the tissues' damage and the vaccine included the spike protein.

Pretty sure “this vaccine causes all the damaging effects of COVID” side effect would have shown up somewhere in Phase I-III trials.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna.html

Yes, but without the vaccine, most people will get infected by real COVID, which introduces the same spike protein (in an uncontrolled quantity, as the virus is replicating) and several other proteins, causing even more damage. Is this a better outcome?

> we have government regulations and protocols that concern drug approvals to make sure that the general population is not exposed to unnecessary risks

These protocols are tuned to be super-safe when there is little at stake. With a raging pandemic, with a nontrivial mortality/long-term effects/economic and societal effects, you are going to change this.

The debunking stuff just isn't content interesting these people who are not seeking it out.

It doesn't change any minds.

And yes, of course there are many websites, free online textbooks and recorded lectures explaining such concepts available to anyone willing to spend some time on it. Even in Czech, so no language barrier.

The only infamous videos I am aware of have been misrepresented, in such the same way you are implying now.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/23/tiktok-pos...

The Pfizer and especially Moderna vaccines were as close as we could get to an ideal vaccine and had a high efficacy rate - for the Alpha variant. We did get it right. Additionally, the risk of death from the vaccine is effectively zero outside of extremely rare and very specific circumstances that are much less common than death or long term to permanent side effects of COVID-19.

The target is a moving one, especially when a substantial part of the population allows (or can do nothing to stop) the virus to mutate unchecked. The Delta variant has a slightly different spike protein, and we are very lucky the vaccines remain effective at all against it.

Plus a healthy dose of disinformation about the safety and efficacy profiles of these therapies.

If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate?

It is not my impression that "energy input of people spreading X is an order of magnitude lower". On the other hand, they obsess over such topics and spend a lot of time spreading their views - that is why they are visible.

"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

The above does in fact describe a "clear and present" danger. You'll notice, however, that saying anything on the subject of vaccines, a pedophilic cabal in Hollywood, or the Moon landing is in no way like triggering the immediate stampede of desperate people who have no time to consider the truth or falsehood of potentially being trapped in a burning building.

That analogy is simply too often misused. I have to wonder if its misuse isn't itself "misinformation."

This crisis is used to gain more control about information channels. This is also the main criticism here, nobody argues about the validity of claims some people bring forward as an argument against vaccination.

> What is insidious, as Ulfkotte confesses, is that typically, intelligence agencies use “unofficial covers”—people working for the agency but not actually on its payroll as agents. It is a broad, loose network of “friends,” doing one another favors. Many are lead journalists from numerous countries. This informality provides plausible deniability for both sides, but it means an “unofficial cover,” as Ulfkotte became, is on his own if captured.

> The American reporter James Foley, allegedly executed by ISIS, found that out. Ulfkotte confirmed to this author that Foley did indeed work for various intelligence organizations, as this newspaper reported on last month. He also stated that if a journalist is accused of spying, such reports are almost always credible.

The point of this article is that journalists are just as fallible to money as everyone else. That the alphabet soup agencies don't mind using journalists for their own ends. To assume that stops with spying is an argument from silence (lol, but to assume that it does go past that is also an argument from silence).

Which is exactly why we need to uphold classical liberal principles, as well as speak truth with appropriate nuance.

The best way to deal with a bad idea is with a better idea, not by silencing the bad idea.

I'd have a lot more respect for Google in this case if they, in collaboration with researchers and experts, produced their own well-researched, nuanced, carefully stated arguments against what they disagree with.

The first instinct of an autocrat is to strangle free speech of his critics. This has been the case since forever.

For all their errors, societies that do have wide freedom of speech rarely lapse into tyrannies on their own account. The freedom to say that the emperor's new clothes are bullsh*t is precious.

As for your historical examples, Weimar democracy was deeply flawed in that it tolerated party militias and a lot of violence in the streets. Once people are threatened physically, they will seek 'protection' from gangsters. But violence is something very different from actual words.

And China isn't a case of a democracy that was taken over by cunning speeches of its enemies. CCP got into power by winning a civil war.

Every specific case is different; you can always find some facts which differentiate one instance from the 'general case'. It is not enough to say 'this time is different', one must overcome the presumption that general rules should hold.

Newsstands contain dozens of newspapers, typically all owned by only 1 or 2 conglomerates. How is that any different than a Facebook feed which shows hundreds of groups spamming out propoganda, all of which are operated by a much smaller number of entities?

It took a while to be especially effective, both because techniques of propaganda had to be learned, and because the general populace was not literate. As of 1500, population literacy rates in Western Europe were on the order of 10--25%. The climbed to 90%+ in the 19th century, the midpoint of which saw rapid advances in printing technology (iron presses, powered presses, web presses), a sustainable business model (advertising, as it happens). And in the year 1848, Europe basically exploded into revolution, affecting over 50 counries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848

More generally, the role of the printing press as an agent of change (social, political, economic) is the subject of Elizabeth Eisenstein's book of the same name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein#The_Print...

This is the same situation as climate change. Instead of doing sensible things, we banned plastic straws! (Now paper straws come in plastic packaging...). Or the situation that UK and Germany find themselves in (having invested in stupid but "green" solutions).

>4chan has moderation

Please, elaborate

Also, /pol/ is not all of 4chan, there's a reason it's called a containment board.

Back in the day, the Internet wasn't dominated by Facebook and Google.

Begs the question as to why the system is falling apart now and not earlier this year.

Like there are a lot of social networks, have you noticed that every single one is monitoring for COVID related content and adding a banner?

tldr: competition can't solve political issues because there's a monopoly on government

Social networks are unprecedented in our world. Never have you been able to spread misinformation and propaganda as quickly. I don't know what the right answer is, but it certainly shouldn't be to sit back and do nothing because "censorship". This misinformation campaign is actively killing people.