From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly   
   By Bret Swanson, July 7, 2023, WSJ   
   In the wake of the 1986 Challenger space-shuttle explosion, Nobel   
   Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman knew that the truth would both fuel   
   progress and soothe the nation’s sorrow. “For a successful technology,”   
   he said, “reality must take    
   precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”   
      
   For 3 years, pandemic public relations mocked nature, generating fear,   
   illness, inflation and excess death beyond what the virus caused. Digital   
   censorship supercharged the effort to hide reality, but reality is getting its   
   day in court.   
      
   On July 4, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty temporarily blocked numerous   
   federal agencies and the White House from collaborating with social-media   
   companies and third-party groups to censor speech.   
      
   Discovery in Missouri v. Biden exposed relationships among govt agencies and   
   social-media firms and revealed an additional layer of university centers and   
   self-styled disinformation watchdogs and fact-checking outfits.   
      
   Elon Musk’s release of some of Twitter’s internal files revealed that up   
   to 80 FBI agents were embedded with social-media companies. The agents mostly   
   weren’t fighting terrorism but flagging wrongthink by American citizens,   
   including eminent    
   scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy.   
      
   The results of these relationships? Twitter blacklisted Stanford physician and   
   economist Jay Bhattacharya for showing Covid almost exclusively threatened the   
   elderly, severely reducing the visibility of his tweets. When Stanford health   
   policy scholar    
   Scott Atlas began advising the White House, YouTube erased his most prominent   
   video opposing lockdowns. Twitter banned Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA   
   vaccine technology, for calling attention to the vaccines’ dangers. YouTube   
   demonetized evolutionary    
   biologist Bret Weinstein, who suggested the virus might be engineered and   
   predicted vaccine-evading variants. And those are only a few examples.   
      
   Social-media platforms were powerful tools for full-spectrum censorship, but   
   they didn’t act alone. Medical schools, medical boards, science journals and   
   legacy media sang from the same hymnal.   
      
   Legions of doctors stayed quiet after witnessing the demonization of their   
   peers who challenged the Covid orthodoxy. A little censorship leads people to   
   watch what they say. Millions of patients and citizens were deprived of   
   important insights as a    
   result.   
      
   Health authorities and TV doctors insisted young people were vulnerable,   
   demanded toddlers wear masks, closed schools, beaches and parks, and were   
   loath to contemplate crucial cost-benefit analysis. The economy? Mental   
   health? Never heard of them.   
      
   These “experts” denied the protective effects of recovered immunity, a   
   phenomenon we’ve known about since the Plague of Athens in 430 B.C. They   
   effectively prohibited generic drugs approved by the Food and Drug   
   Administration, such as azithromycin    
   and ivermectin, which low-income nations around the world were deploying   
   successfully. They failed to appreciate the evolutionary dynamics of mass   
   vaccination during a pandemic.   
      
   The U.S. govt spent $6 trillion to buoy its shuttered economy, and most people   
   got Covid anyway. Worst of all, the lockdowns and mandates resulted in   
   unprecedented bad health outcomes for young and middle-aged people in rich   
   countries.   
      
   Excess mortality in most high-income nations was worse in 2021 and 2022 than   
   in 2020, the initial pandemic year. Many poorer nations with less government   
   control seemed to fare better. Sweden, which didn’t have a lockdown,   
   performed better than nearly    
   every other advanced nation.   
      
   After navigating 2020 with relative success, young and middle-age healthy   
   people in rich nations began dying in unprecedented numbers in 2021 and 2022.   
   Health authorities haven’t focused enough on this cataclysm of premature   
   death from non-Covid heart    
   attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, kidney failure and cancer.   
      
   Hiding these and other realities has become more difficult in the internet   
   age. The information explosion has allowed more people to spot quickly the   
   mistakes of officials and learn the truth. This has changed the relationship   
   between the authorities and    
   those they govern. Those in charge feel threatened.   
      
   Digital censorship is their response to this crisis of authority. True,   
   misinformation is rampant online. But it was far worse before the internet,   
   when myths could persist for centuries. New technologies allow us to compile   
   data quickly, correct errors,    
   find facts and dispel falsehoods. Science, supported by an open internet, is   
   the process by which we reduce misinformation and approach the truth.   
      
   Artificial intelligence will improve our ability to sift, parse, edit,   
   authenticate and organize information. When you hear calls to license or   
   centralize control of AI, remember the hubris of Covid censorship.   
      
   “Attacks on me,” Dr. Anthony Fauci famously insisted, “quite frankly,   
   are attacks on science.” Feynman would have been appalled. “Science,” he   
   wisely noted, “is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”   
      
   Mr. Swanson is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise   
   Institute. He writes the Infonomena newsletter on Substack dot com.   
      
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-censorship-proved-to-be-deadl   
   -social-media-government-pandemic-health-697c32c4   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)