[_heimdall]

During the pandemic there was a lot of content taken down if it in any way went against the mainstream narrative of the virus or the vaccines. You couldn't discuss concerns or risks of the vaccine, or discuss any alternative therapeutics or treatments.

I want to say you also couldn't discuss the lab leak hypothesis for a while, but I can't remember a specific example for sure so maybe I'm misremembering that one.

[rat87]

Good. We should be praising Google for that decision. That made many bad ones but that seems obviously good and saved a number of lives

[_heimdall]

> obviously good and saved a number of lives

You would really have to show your work on that claim.

"Good" is a judgement call, it may be obviously good to one and obviously bad to another.

Claiming that a number of lives were saved by aggressive YouTube censorship of specific content is also quite a claim. What is the number, and how can you show a direct link between censorship and any one life saved?

[const_cast]

It's really quite simple, and we don't even require proof, just logic.

It's plainly true that less masking, less isolation, and less vaccination leads to increased risk of death or injury to Covid. Therefore, having more content promoting those things must lead to increased risk of death or injury to Covid.

We really don't need to over-intellectualize these things. Saying things that are just not true, which increases someone's risk, results in lives lost.

It would be the same as if I made a PSA telling people to not wear a seatbelt. Or to not wear sunscreen. But if I did that, there would be zero dispute, no? So I think we all understand the concept.

[_heimdall]

> It's plainly true that less masking, less isolation, and less vaccination leads to increased risk of death or injury to Covid.

When you say this is plainly true, how do you back that up exactly? I am unaware of any control tests that would prove out those claims with high certainty.

Our vaccine tests done during the pandemic also not focused on risk of death or injury, they were focused on the frequency of participants notifying of symptoms.

> We really don't need to over-intellectualize these things. Saying things that are just not true, which increases someone's risk, results in lives lost.

I don't see it as over intellectualizing. To claim something is not true requires knowing what is true. We still can't make such claims on many of the pandemic issues, but in the middle of it we absolutely couldn't make such claims.

We also can't make an assumption that a claim being false directly leads to deaths. I can make plenty of false claims that would have absolutely no impact on anything, to say such claims must have led to deaths is ridiculous.

[const_cast]

> When you say this is plainly true, how do you back that up exactly? I am unaware of any control tests that would prove out those claims with high certainty.

Well... they exist. All the covid vaccines were tried against placebo, and I mean true placebo as in saline. But even if you're distrustful of that it's just common sense.

I don't want to get the flu. Okay, the less people I'm around the lower the chance I have of getting the flu.

When I was immunocompromised during cancer treatment I greatly limited the amount of people I'm in contact with because that obviously lowers your risk of contracting an illness.

Again it's just not... rocket science.

If I say "you don't need to wear seat belts" and then that results in a bunch of people not wearing seat belts, then there's gonna be a lot more brains on the interstate.

Well... we know seat belts are effective. We know isolation is effective. We know vaccines are effective. So put two and two together. After a certain point it feels like being contrarian for the sake of it.

And, as an aside, most people are truly unbelievably bad at risk-assessment. People can't get it to click in their head that doing risky thing doesn't mean bad things will happen to them.

You can party, ignore all the vaccines, have people spit in your mouth, whatever - and be perfectly fine. Everything in life is risk analysis. I'm not saying that not getting a vaccine or not following guidelines will kill you. But it will increase your risk.

But you, your family, hell, everyone you know, might be perfectly fine. Or they might end up like that guy I knew in highschool who died at 20 MPH because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. It's all risk analysis.

[_heimdall]

> Well... they exist. All the covid vaccines were tried against placebo, and I mean true placebo as in saline. But even if you're distrustful of that it's just common sense.

Are you referring to the original vaccine trials? I don't remember them being compared against a saline control, but maybe I'm misremembering there.

What I do remember is that they were only run for roughly 4 weeks before unblinding the results and losing any chance at studying the long term affects, both good and bad, of the injections. I also remember that those trials were only converting symptomatic infection during that short period and could tell us nothing of transmissibility. When it came to the children studies, the one study I found proper results for tested the vaccine on 30 children before it was approved for use of kids down to something like 2 years old.

Seatbelts are a whole different thing in my opinion. We do know that seatbelts work, but they work specifically at protecting the person that decides to put one on. I have never understood why we legally mandate seatbelt use when it only helps or hurts the individual using it.