The Actual COVID Censorship Conspiracy
How Real Science About COVID-19 was Silenced by an Obnoxious Barrage of Noise
What is the Golden Rule of Politics? Follow the money.
Over at the Counter Disinformation Project, Karam Bales assembled and mapped out an incredible timeline of how a series of well-funded yet completely fraudulent astroturf organizations that did not exist prior to 2020 completely dominated the “debate” around the COVID-19 pandemic:
This section from April 2020 is worth highlighting:
“Toby Young announced the founding of Lockdown Sceptics (now Daily Sceptic) at the start of the UK lockdown having argued that letting up to 250,000 vulnerable people die from covid was a price worth paying to protect the economy. Lockdown Sceptics became a media hub for alternative experts and was thanked by AIER in their defence of the Great Barrington Declaration.”
What CDP leaves out, and what should enrage every American, is that Toby Young is a depraved crank with no medical or scientific credentials. His Twitter account is followed by Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and other leaders of our federal public health agencies. What’s notable about this is that Toby the crackpot loves to post one catchphrase, over and over, year after year:
The singular most effective public health intervention of all of human history, and Young is claiming it’s merely an “era” that is “over?” This is the sort of depravity that is holding influence over taxpayer funded civil servants. Instead of condemning such obvious quackery and all those who chose to associate with it, our universities and media chose to legitimize such an obvious coup of the public sphere in a time of crisis. This is indefensible, and many lost their lives and their health as a result of this overwhelming barrage of disinformation.
If you asked the average person off the street who should direct the response to an infectious disease pandemic, they would likely say doctors who actually treat patients and scientists with relevant experience should hold the greatest influence. This clearly did not happen. Instead, well-funded disinformation campaigns in many forms overwhelmed the public with elaborate fables, weaponizing social media to spread falsehoods like a highly contagious virus. All the while, the ever-growing mountain of research showing the harms of COVID-19 across the body has been effectively shut out of the national conversation.
Shouldn’t this be considered a form of censorship?
A Modern Definition of Censorship
The traditionally held definition of censorship is when The State suppresses or silences speech it doesn’t like. This is considered a no-go in a civic democracy, and a great deal of classical fiction such as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 has correctly demonized such behavior. The term “censorship” is highly emotionally charged and disproving such an accusation can prove difficult.
The problem we now face is that we live in a wildly different media environment from the days of Orwell and Bradbury. Economic disparity, social media, and unchecked corporate power have totally upended the discourse environment. The digital apocalypse of “junk data” that Hideo Kojima warned about in 2001 has been realized. It’s now much harder to find reliably factual information than ever, and this is by design as a form of political control.
If I can control what you believe, totally disconnected from tangible reality, then I wield great power over you. I can radicalize you into violence based upon complete falsehoods wrapped in emotionally manipulative language. The mind becomes trapped in a prison of shadows and spectacle. When you look at the moral depravity of the corporate executives who dominate our economy, why wouldn’t they seek out & abuse this sort of power?
One might be inclined to ask: Why do this?
The Motivation for Contamination
Let us think back to 2020 for a moment. We saw massive government interventions on behalf of everyday working Americans including financial aid, which cut child poverty in half, and people taking measures to protect the health of one another - which were actually quite effective! This meant that the irrational whims of tech billionaires were not the center of the universe or the first priority of elected officials, and that had to come to an end.
Whether it was Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya for conservative audiences, or Brown’s Emily Oster for liberal audiences, there was an overwhelming flood of billionaire backed disinformation to downplay the threat of COVID-19. Now tens of millions are disabled (even going by the HHS’ lowball rate of 7%) and Long COVID has become the leading chronic illness in children, overtaking asthma. What the public is being taught is that they should consider their health & their lives disposable; that they should turn a blind eye to the suffering of their community.
Purely isolated individuals, free from any sort of community so that they may be exploited for the profiteering of their economic betters. Widespread infectious disease outbreaks are a disciplinary measure to fortify political control, and enabling them with a flood of disinformation to legitimize absurd falsehoods aligns perfectly with this larger agenda. Unfortunately, too many think there is some sort of “common ground” to be found with these petty tyrants.
When Billionaire-Backed Censors Play the Victim
One of the common calling cards of COVID disinformation artists is that they are the victims of a grand conspiracy of censorship. Over at Dr. Jonathan Howard’s Youtube channel, you will find countless examples of Jay Bhattacharya falsely claiming that he is a victim of censorship. From Twitter to Youtube to FOX News, if you were looking for reliable information about COVID-19 and what to do to protect the health of you and your loved ones, you were much more likely to see Podcast Jay’s smug grin rambling nonsense. Podcast Jay even went so far to take this claim of censorship to the Supreme Court.
This was a total lie, as Mike Masnick reports for Techdirt (emphasis mine):
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the original individual plaintiffs who claimed he was censored by the Biden administration, had to drop out of the case because he was confirmed as Director of the National Institutes of Health — the agency he claimed (without evidence) had “censored him” even though his lawyers somehow forgot to add NIH as a defendant … The supposed victims of government censorship are now running the very agencies they accused of censoring them. And, again, I have to reinforce, that the Supreme Court called out the lack of actual “censorship” for either of these guys.
…
But the real tell is what’s happening right now, while MAGA is celebrating: the Trump admin is doing far worse than anything Biden was even accused of. Yes, while the Trump administration and its gullible friends are busy patting themselves on the back for supposedly defending free speech from the horrors of the Biden administration sharing information with social media companies, it is engaged in conduct that is far, far worse than anything alleged in Missouri v. Biden.
Jay & his ilk refused to accept the court’s ruling and continued to double down on his gimmick. This had nothing to do with censorship. It was all about advertising their message: we have the real science that the government doesn’t want you to know! We’re heroic crusaders for truth, science, and American freedom! Whatever you do, don’t look behind the curtain and notice the cape-wearing neo-Confederate champion for teen smoking and child labor!
The constant stream of podcasts from the NIH Director is, in itself, a form of censorship by drowning out those pointing out Jay Bhattacharya’s constant errors and fictions. Here is a civil servant paid by the American taxpayer who refuses to engage with criticisms from the public he is supposed to be working on behalf of. Claiming that he is merely “getting the ideology out of science,” Podcast Jay is actually involved in the ideological project of ending federally funded science - that only corporate executives should be dictating what research & innovation happens in America.
In other words, private censorship of actual science is the goal.
How Legitimate Science About COVID-19 Was Censored
Credible scientific, and especially medical research, takes a great deal of time to realize. The precautionary principle of public health emerged to prevent needless harms caused by new and emerging threats. Many in 2020 sought to obscure this reality by insisting we already knew all there was to know about a new SARS virus and the disease it caused. Sadly, too many saw fit to legitimize their obscene antics.
As Counter Disinformation Project has well documented, wealthy billionaires like Peter Thiel exploited the legitimacy of respected universities such as Oxford, Brown, Harvard, Stanford, etc. by propping up credentialed academics who were more than happy to offer up opinions about matters of life and death way out of their wheelhouse. These utterly fraudulent propaganda outlets that never existed prior to 2020 spewed all sorts of nonsense across social media and mainstream news outlets. Sadly, experienced journalists let themselves be hoodwinked by such blatant deceptions, and failed in their obligations to the public.
Narratives rooted in fantasy overwhelmed hard scientific fact. Death was the only negative outcome that mattered, and somehow we could magically identify “the vulnerable,” who were essentially told to fend for themselves. The public’s conception of the virus, and what it is capable of, became a complete distortion of reality. The censorship of real science had won out, and the only result is very real, tangible harm.
So Now What?
It should be obvious at this point that private interests, including morally depraved tech billionaires, sabotaged that COVID-19 pandemic response by flooding the public discourse with highly unscientific propaganda. This caused a great deal of physical harm to the public, and “the economy” these human sacrifices were supposed to serve has never recovered. Legitimate science that should have informed COVID-19 policy was shut out of the room for embarrassing nonsense.
Our universities, journalism outlets, and other essential institutions need to re-establish professional standards, and that means cranks like Emily Oster getting kicked to the curb. You simply cannot “compromise” in “good faith” with credentialed ventriloquists who are peddling fictions on behalf of wealthy interests. They are bludgeoning the public with an unyielding torrent of unscientific nonsense and fictional narratives as a form of political control - and we should all be able to come together and oppose them on behalf of science, democracy, and human decency.
Do you really think the same corporate executives who are in the middle of triggering a new financial crisis are really the people who should be dictating the government’s response to a national disaster? This is a long & bloody fight we need to be having now, while this country is being driven off the edge of a cliff and experiencing an anti-intellectual brain drain. The whimpering cowards who keep legitimizing the lies of Jay Bhattacharya and the rest of the Pro-SARS Brigade aren’t going to save us.
