Here we have “Julia Belluz, a health reporter at Vox and Dr. John Lavis, a professor at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Together, they worked on the Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges.” In other words, people who don’t really do anything, they just like telling Other People how to live their lives, and the NY Times is happy to post their screed
Getting Rid of Joe Rogan Won’t Solve the Health Misinformation Problem
Another week, another platform in trouble for allowing its talent to give voice to misinformation. This time, Joe Rogan suggested that the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are a type of “gene therapy” and that young people are at a greater risk from the shots than the disease, among other false and dubious health claims featured on his popular, Spotify-hosted podcast. The calls to remove his podcast have only intensified after revelations that he’s also repeatedly used a racist slur on the show, leading Spotify’s chief to apologize to the company’s employees.
The best outcome of the scandal wouldn’t be that Mr. Rogan was kicked off Spotify, at least not for the health bunk. It would be seeing his misleading Covid content in context: It’s just a tiny drop in the ocean of online health nonsense. (snip)
The problem is so much bigger than Joe Rogan or Spotify. And platforms, lawmakers and regulators aren’t keeping up.
Why should they, unless it is seriously putting people’s lives directly, immediately, at stake? Of course, in Liberal World, that “at stake” is capricious, transitional, spasmodic, always ever changing on a whim. They’re perfectly fine with the notion that Bush made/let happen 9/11, despite all the evidence against it. They were perfectly fine with things like Bush stole the 2000 election. That Trump stole the 2016 election due to Russia, which was debunked. That teaching people that it’s fine to believe you’re the opposite sex, despite the massive mental and physical health issues associated is just fine.
The piece even takes on lots of the crazy stuff at Amazon, from books to supplements to products. And crazy stuff at Netflix and Apple TV, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop crap and other “documentaries”.
It’s clear that misinformation harms human health, stokes panic, wastes money and leads people to miss opportunities to pursue options that could have helped. But the new fire hose of bunk is also harming us in less obvious ways. It’s hitting our fractured societies — and, we believe, contributing to further polarization.
It’s a free society, chumps, something we know you don’t like. Now do transgenders taking away opportunities from real women, harming their lives. Teaching kindergarteners about anal sex. Those are real issues.
…Instead, we need to prevent false or misleading health claims from reaching millions of people in the first place.
Doing this won’t be easy. It will require a mix of strategies, tailored to different platforms and groups. E-commerce sites like Amazon could introduce content warnings or adjust their pricing and ranking algorithms for health products and books that have been flagged for misinformation. Governments could also step in and mandate evidentiary standards for a broader range of health statements than the pharmaceutical and food claims they currently regulate.
See? It’s not censorship. How about mandating evidentiary standards for everything done during COVID, rather than simply watching government freak and just slap restrictions on?
https://twitter.com/StillCrankyAF/status/1490740410561536001
Many Blue states are looking to remove mask mandates for some reason. Oh, and
With the rapid decline of Omicron, pandemic restrictions will be lifted sooner rather than later. In considering when to do so, health officials must factor in natural immunity, not just vaccination rates. This CDC chart recognizes natural immunity and so should health officials. pic.twitter.com/6Hk0f4NRhC
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) February 7, 2022
Suddenly Dems want to consider natural immunity, after blowing it off since Biden took office and was pushing the vaccines, which, if you remember, were supposed to stop people from having and spreading COVID at the high 90% range. What do the vaccines do now?
We also need approaches that would have an impact across the web, like raising the stakes for health professionals who, as two health care experts fighting disinformation wrote, are “weaponizing their white coats” to mislead the public. Right now, state medical regulatory bodies focus on individual patient encounters, not the role doctors might play as healers for the masses. The American Medical Association has commented occasionally on public-facing physicians, yet while doctor disinformation has only worsened in the pandemic, few physicians have been reprimanded by their state boards.
And go after doctors engaged in Wrongthink. Which is basically whatever the Progressives are against.
Read: Progressives: Govt Shouldn’t Censor Misinformation, They Should “Mandate Evidentiary Standards” »