he Impact of Censorship on Covid-19 Policy Formation in the United States by Victor Wallis https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/3822 https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/3822/99193546939
Dissident doctors whose response to Covid was censored found a platform with right-wing politicians and media. This gave enhanced political legitimacy, ironically, to the very forces that were most opposed to the kind of regulatory policies and system of universal healthcare....
Contrary to the view advanced by right-wing ideologues, what threatens people’s wellbeing is not public authority as such, but rather public authority shaped by private interests. There is no way the needed improvements in public health can be attained without government playing a role. The Right plays upon people’s fear of government by invoking Orwellian images of totalitarian intrusion into everyone’s private life. But such intrusion is carried out by private as well as governmental entities..
Steven Johnson : I'm disheartened to see an article .. arguing some crucial points about the need for universal health care, mixed in with much more dubious and potentially discrediting points, and published in what appears to be a faux academic publication see http://flakyc.blogspot.com/2020/11/european-society-of-medicine-esmed.html
public health people did what they could to combat the endless B.S. attacks by the Covid denying industry/cult against each and every one of the only tools we have in our toolbox to address the pandemic: masks, distancing, contact tracing and isolation, vaccines, etc. And when they called that life-endangering B.S. for what it was, and refrained from
publishing it in prestigious journals, the B.S. production industry/cult
calls it censorship.
Victor Wallis : Instead of addressing the arguments given and the evidence cited, he targets the author and the venue.... If what the dissidents asserted was simply wrong, the defenders of orthodoxy would be able to refute it. Recourse to censorship suggests that they are unable to do this. Steven Johnson suggests that criticizing a big pharma-driven agenda clashes with the goal (which we share) of working toward universal healthcare. Not so. A holistic approach to health-matters -- challenging big pharma's overemphasis on drugs, pills, and vaccines -- is consistent with a socialist approach to healthcare, which rejects profit-driven choices. Climate, Covid, Class, and Capital Victor Wallis https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455752.2023.2175974 parallel between the ecosocialist goal of biodiversity and respect for the complexities of the human immune system
Mofwoofoo: there can never ever be an "arbiter of truth". Censorship is a big step towards totalitarianism and the Left should have never gone along with it
Taken from a discuss in WSM