The Twitter files, Covid edition

Considering how this probably cost lives, it might be the worst of our Government interference into social media.

Now interestingly, the collective moderators over at Twitter actually did less censoring and banning than the Administration and CDC wanted them to do. While they did censor and/or ban several accounts of legitimate doctors and medical personnel, the CDC wanted more.

But part of the problem here is that the people doing the moderation were not well qualified medical experts, and tended to lean on the opinions of the Government doctors (the CDC) and what the Administration told them. They did push back on certain things based on some limited use of outside medical consultants, but many legitimate medical opinions (which were eventually proved right) were censored and the people responsible for giving the good advice were banned at the request of people giving the wrong advice.

That being said, all we needed to do back during the height of Covid when certain use of the terms Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine would get you banned to twitter jail. You were free to falsely tweet about how Joe Rogan took horse dewormer or how Trump was pushing people to drink aquarium cleaner without censorship. But tell people that these treatments worked (as they have been proven to over and over) and you got slapped down. Why were known lies allowed and factual claims censored? Were our powers to be that incompetent (even the FDA eventually approved Ivermectin as a safe an effective treatment of Covid) or was there something else at play?

I tend to believe that like everything else, politics reared it's ugly head and people died because of it. I am not convinced that some of these people were less worried about Americans dying than they were about admitting that these treatments were working. After all, admitting that Ivermectin or other early treatments worked would lend credibility to people like Donald Trump and Joe Rogan while undermining their own?

How many dead Americans is the CDC's reputation worth to them?

At the end of the day the American response to Covid was abysmal compared to other first world countries. We had higher rates of Covid deaths and considerably higher rates of "excess" deaths which probably mattered more. The number one thing we did differently than those who performed well was refuse (absolutely refuse) to allow people to be treated when other countries routinely did so. One of the manners in which the CDC controlled people and stopped us from getting treatment was putting a lid on talk of such treatments on social media.