> Overall, I don't really see too much that would cause me to gasp with horror.
I didn't "gasp", but, silently blocking an esteemed scientist is indeed horrible.
He, and who knows how many others, presented sensible analyses against extended lockdowns in schools. This dissenting view, like with the lableak theory, was systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes, and thus from reaching parents minds.
The harm done to an entire generation of children is very real. The opportunity cost from wasting vaccinations in children is very real. The discussion was warped, and the narrative was rammed down people's brains. There are second-order effects with that kind of brain power-washing at mass scale.
This wasn't an isolated incident either. Literally millions of posts were removed and shadowbanned to various degrees. No one at any of these companies has suffered any semblance of accountability in any form.
> The dissenting view, like with the lableak theory, was systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes, and thus from reaching parents minds.
I would hope that journalists conduct their research through better means than solely reading Tweets. That would be an exceptionally lazy standard, one which would merit a failing grade for a high school paper.
That being said, "systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes" seems basically false given that this person co-authored a story that was published in the Wall Street Journal! [1]
> Literally millions of posts were removed and shadowbanned to various degrees. No one at any of these companies has suffered any semblance of accountability in any form.
Being punished for exerting control over what is publish on your private web site seems to me like massive government overreach to me. I don't think anyone would administer web forums if the government started telling them how they could and could not moderate posting.
Yes someone published a story in the Wall Street Journal, but this thread is talking about Twitter. Twitter is not exonerated because some other outlet did something differently.
The point here is that they were specifically responding to government requests to censor information. That is truly government overreach, but in the opposite direction to what you claim.
>Being punished for exerting control over what is publish on your private web site seems to me like massive government overreach to me. I don't think anyone would administer web forums if the government started telling them how they could and could not moderate posting.
Just wait until you realize that corporations at a certain scale become a form of government themselves!
> silently blocking an esteemed scientist is indeed horrible
My understanding is that anyone using the chrono timeline could still his tweets as they happened. Twitter deciding not to promote his tweets in the algo timeline seems far away from blocking.
He was right about lockdowns on school children having huge potential for harm. And it was very, very wrong to censor such posts.
And again, this was far from an isolated incident. Millions of posts were removed, tens of millions were shadowbanned, delisted, deranked, hidded, supressed, etc.
Views questioning natural origin, official policy, vaccinating children or school lockdowns were smeared as anti-science and sinister... The irony might be funny if it wasn't so harmful.
Twitter should have been more aggressive with taking down COVID misinformation, not less. I saw "#hydroxychloroquine" trend far too often, with posts advocating using it as a substitute for vaccines at the top of the results upon clicking it.
I don't like the term misinformation. I don't think Twitter should have restricted his tweets. However, it's important to remember Bhattacharya was wrong.
In the op-ed posted above he guessed that the predicted death toll of 2-4 million people was off by multiple orders of magnitude. He said that dramatic interventions like lockdowns would be justified to prevent that kind of death toll, but that COVID was nowhere near that deadly.
So far COVID has killed about a million Americans. So by the logic he lays out in that op-ed his policy proposals were wrong.
We can never know how many people Covid killed in America, because the rubric in the US is to count as a Covid "death" any death where the deceased tested positive for covid. In that group might be someone who would have not died had they not had Covid, but it also includes many people who would have died regardless of Covid positivity.
It is also to count as a Covid hospitalization, anyone hospitalized who tests positive for Covid in the hospital.
In both cases, all we can say is that somewhere between none and all of them are actually in that condition because of Covid.
He was responding to an estimate that placed the death toll at 3.4%.
The highest estimates now seem to be at around .28%.
That's more than an order of magnitude. He wasn't all that wrong.
Also, he advised focusing efforts on the most vulnerable; the elderly and people with comorbidities. He was very right there too. All those vaccines into kids and lockdowns of schools after the elderly were triple-vaccinated was a stunning misallocation of resources.
While I don't think many of Jay's points were wrong, he sort of established himself as an anti-establishment person. I think if he had acted slightly differently, we'd all be praising him for keeping us from making a big mistake.
But the reality is that the medical establishment has an immune system honed by decades of vaccine denialism (remember "vaccines cause autism because mercury") and tends to overreact when people- acting in good faith- question its findings publicly.
The medical establishment bring on a lack of trust due to their close ties with pharmaceutical companies who's aim is to simply make profits from the "medicine discovery of the day", no matter the consequences.
If the medical establishment (doctors, scientists, researchers, etc) took no funding from pharmaceutical companies, it might help their position. Taking funding from companies that have way too often been found of wrong doing, just poisons people's view of the whole system.
I didn't "gasp", but, silently blocking an esteemed scientist is indeed horrible.
He, and who knows how many others, presented sensible analyses against extended lockdowns in schools. This dissenting view, like with the lableak theory, was systematically blocked from ever reaching journalists eyes, and thus from reaching parents minds.
The harm done to an entire generation of children is very real. The opportunity cost from wasting vaccinations in children is very real. The discussion was warped, and the narrative was rammed down people's brains. There are second-order effects with that kind of brain power-washing at mass scale.
This wasn't an isolated incident either. Literally millions of posts were removed and shadowbanned to various degrees. No one at any of these companies has suffered any semblance of accountability in any form.