The last three months of 2022 saw a drop in routine paediatric vaccination levels in New York City from 64.5% a year ago to 59.2%, a five-point drop. The New York Post has little doubt about who is to blame. According to a piece by the Editorial Board last week, it is because “city, state and federal officials lied again and again to the public about the efficacy of numerous Covid interventions including masking, social distancing, school closures and vaccines”.
Closing schools seemed sensible in the earliest days of 2020, but the data soon proved that young kids basically never get the bug. Most masks do nothing to reduce transmission, nor does six feet of social distancing. And making toddlers mask in school risks major developmental harm.
Heavy-lockdown states fared no better in health outcomes than mainly-open ones — and fared worse economically and most likely in mental health, too.
Every element of the public-health establishment from Dr. Anthony Fauci on down got many of these points wrong, even long after the science was clear. Worse still, government pushed censorship (as “misinformation”) of any discussion of the downsides of any intervention. And that included the real risks to younger men of cardiac problems associated with vaccination.
In short, the public-health establishment earned a ton of distrust. Tragically, that’s now feeding doubts about MMR jabs, leaving more New York kids vulnerable to measles, mumps and other childhood diseases that actually present real danger to the young — unlike Covid.
So what is the city doing in response to this catastrophe? “Confronting rising vaccination hesitancy through media campaigns, providing educational forums to providers and community-based organisations, and providing tools to talk about vaccine confidence with patients and parents.”
More lectures, in short, from the lost-credibility crew.
America needs a trustworthy public-health establishment, but getting it requires some kind of truth-and-reconciliation commission, with significant firings and massive, unflinching and public mea culpas from city, state and federal health departments — and reforms aiming to ensure they never make the same mistakes again.
Do it for the children.
Worth reading in full.
Of course, there will be those who blame ‘anti-vaxxers’ for spreading ‘harmful misinformation’ and call for even more severe censorship of anyone challenging the efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccines. But if the New York Post is right, that will only increase mistrust in the medical establishment and lead to greater vaccine hesitancy – a doom loop that will end with the needless deaths of children who haven’t been vaccinated against diseases like measles. Is the New York Post right? The Editorial Board isn’t alone in believing that claiming public health policies are dictated by ‘the Science’ and smearing and no-platforming those who challenge the evidence has the opposite of its intended effect, increasing mistrust in public health authorities. The Royal Society published a report last year – ‘The Online Misinformation Environment: Understanding how the internet shapes people’s engagement with scientific information’ – that more or less came to the same conclusion. Professor Frank Kelly, who chaired the group that authored the report, said in a press release:
In the early days of the pandemic, science was too often painted as absolute and somehow not to be trusted when it corrects itself, but that prodding and testing of received wisdom is integral to the advancement of science, and society.
This is important to bear in mind when we are looking to limit scientific misinformation’s harms to society. Clamping down on claims outside the consensus may seem desirable, but it can hamper the scientific process and force genuinely malicious content underground.
Obviously, we don’t regard questioning the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, as ‘scientific misinformation’. But it is instructive that even those who are quick to dismiss dissenting points of view as ‘misinformation’, like the authors of this report, nevertheless don’t believe its helpful to suppress this dissent. Here is one of the report’s recommendations, entitled: ‘Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal as a solution to online scientific misinformation.’
Society benefits from honest and open discussion on the veracity of scientific claims. These discussions are an important part of the scientific process and should be protected. When these discussions risk causing harm to individuals or wider society, it is right to seek measures which can mitigate against this. This has often led to calls for online platforms to remove content and ban accounts However, whilst this approach may be effective and essential for illegal content (e.g. hate speech, terrorist content, child sexual abuse material) there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of this approach for scientific misinformation, and approaches to addressing the amplification of misinformation may be more effective
In addition, demonstrating a causal link between online misinformation and offline harm is difficult to achieve, and there is a risk that content removal may cause more harm than good by driving misinformation content (and people who may act upon it) towards harder-to-address corners of the internet.
Deciding what is and is not scientific misinformation is highly resource intensive and not always immediately possible to achieve as some scientific topics lack consensus or a trusted authority for platforms to seek advice from. What may be feasible and affordable for established social media platforms may be impractical or prohibitively expensive for emerging platforms which experience similar levels of engagement (e.g. views, uploads, users).
Furthermore, removing content may exacerbate feelings of distrust and be exploited by others to promote misinformation content.
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