• FluTrackers.com Inc. does not provide medical advice. Information on this web site is collected from various internet resources, and the FluTrackers board of directors makes no warranty to the safety, efficacy, correctness or completeness of the information posted on this site by any author or poster. The information collated here is for instructional and/or discussion purposes only and is NOT intended to diagnose or treat any disease, illness, or other medical condition. Every individual reader or poster should seek advice from their personal physician/healthcare practitioner before considering or using any interventions that are discussed on this website. By continuing to access this website you agree to consult your personal physican before using any interventions posted on this website, and you agree to hold harmless FluTrackers.com Inc., the board of directors, the members, and all authors and posters for any effects from use of any medication, supplement, vitamin or other substance, device, intervention, etc. mentioned in posts on this website, or other internet venues referenced in posts on this website.
  • We are not asking for any donations. Do not donate to any entity who says they are raising funds for us.

Discussion about pandemic censorship

I have re-named this forum to "Comments, Discussion, & Not Proven Science Ideas"

I am strongly against scientific censorship. I think if an "expert" proposes an opinion, we should be able to investigate this. It is a huge public service. It might be our greatest public service yet.

We are one of the only free media in the world. People know this.

For instance, JJackson and I argued for the last year about the origin of the pandemic. I did not censor him. It would have been easy. A click of a button. But I did not. Why? It was a great public value to see all sides.

Same for other theories out there. People are confused. The CDC says "xyz"....then they reverse themselves...same with many governmental departments around the world. Politics gets involved...the public is screwed.

As to many "experts"...well...they need funding...so that is always a situation to be considered...

Let's say, hypothetically, a well known expert in biology says that eating walnuts* will cure severe COVID-19. And his/her quotes are carried in many main stream newspapers and alternative news sites. This assertion is carried onto facebook, twitter, and youtube who try to ban this topic as fast as it gets posted by thousands of people. The CDC comes out and says this idea is ridiculous.

This idea will automatically get traction. Doesn't everyone realize that a banning by facebook, twitter, youtube is a badge of honor? Instant credibility and a new conspiracy theory is born.

It is a false concept that ignoring or banning ideas that are not endorsed by established science is a public service. On the contrary - it gives birth to even more bizarre theories.

In the above case I would start a thread in this forum...."Walnuts - an effective treatment for COVID-19?" Then we can honestly debate this idea. When we do this we always find the truth. We analyze the backgrounds of supporters of proposed therapies. We look for other supportive research. We debate the merits. We post the reactions of opposing scientists/researchers.

This is very valuable work and the only way to reach many segments of our populations who no longer trust "the powers that be".

If you really want to knock down "conspiracy" theories that have gained wide distribution, the best venue for that is here.



*(Eating walnuts is NOT a treatment for COVID-19. If you are sick consult a medical professional.)
 
JJackson, I took the time to listen to the Goddek interview and he clearly stated he had no background in virology. He would not even define the term PCR. He didn't judge the paper on the PCR science. He simply had been asked on Twitter whether the length of time the paper was peer reviewed was customary. He used his math skills and background editing journals to find that the peer review was only 2 days or less, when normally it would be much longer (172 days)
https://twitter.com/goddeketal/status/1346110770975809543/photo/1

It seems odd he was met with attacks rather than an explanation. The paper seems to be presented as peer-reviewed. I think it should have been presented as preliminary peer-reviewed pending full review.
 
"This idea will automatically get traction. Doesn't everyone realize that a banning by facebook, twitter, youtube is a badge of honor? Instant credibility and a new conspiracy theory is born."

It certainly doesn't inspire confidence in the intelligence of those doing the censorship, but if they are trying to suppress a valid point or question, it is a good thing if the idea gets traction.
 
I think the attempts by twitter, facebook, youtube, main stream media, etc. to control information only serves to exponentially spread the very ideas that they are trying to censor. It is an effort that always backfires for them.
 
Reposted from the thread "Discussion: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Wuhan has been working with bats and coronavirus for many years - DNA manipulations, cloning...."
https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum...r-many-years-dna-manipulations-cloning/page24
...
As Petrovsky considered whether SARS-CoV-2 may have emerged in lab cultures with human cells, or cells engineered to express the human ACE2 protein, a letter penned by 27 scientists appeared suddenly on Feb. 19 in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. The authors insisted that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin, and they condemned any alternate hypotheses as conspiracy theories that create only ?fear, rumors, and prejudice.?

Petrovksy says he found the letter infuriating. Conspiracy theorists is ?the last thing we were, and it looked to be pointing at people like us,? he says.
...
But in late April 2020, as Petrovsky?s group was thinking about where to publish their work, ?Trump blurted out? that he had reason to believe that the virus came out of a Chinese lab, Petrovsky says. And at that point, he adds, much of ?the left-wing media decided they were going to paint the whole lab thing as a conspiracy theory to bring down Trump.? When Petrovsky approached administrators of the preprint server bioRxiv, the paper was refused. BioRxiv staff replied that it would be more appropriately distributed after peer review, ?which stunned us,? Petrovksy says. ?We thought the whole point of preprint was to get important information out quickly.?

The paper was subsequently posted on a different preprint server called arXiv.org, based out of Cornell University.
...
Petrovsky describes himself as politically neutral, and according to sources, he is highly regarded in the vaccine world. Maria Elena Bottazzi, a microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, says Petrovsky doesn?t make scientific claims that aren?t fully supported by evidence. And yet, simply following the science, Petrovsky suggests, had become too politically fraught. ?We were dealing with global forces,? he says, ?that are way more powerful than a scientist trying to tell a science-based story.?
...
BY LATE SPRING of 2020, scientists in the natural origins camp had taken the upper hand in shaping opinions. Only a few researchers have looked deeply into SARS-CoV-2?s origins, and according to the Broad Institute?s Chan, the vast majority of those who did not investigate the question simply accepted what they perceived to be the prevailing view.
...
In Australia, Petrovksy says he is trying to stay above the fray. He says he was warned to avoid speaking publicly about his modeling findings. ?A lot of people advised us ?even if it?s good science, don?t talk about it. It will have a negative impact on your vaccine development. You will get attacked; they will try to discredit you.??
...
?If we are at the point where all science is politicized and no one cares about truth and only being politically correct,? he says, ?we may as well give up and shut down and stop doing science.?

https://undark.org/2021/03/17/lab-leak-science-lost-in-politics/
 
Op-Ed: We Should All Care About Censorship in Science
? Let people say the wrong things sometimes

by Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH November 30, 2020

Over the last few months, I have seen academic articles and op-eds by professors retracted or labeled "fake news" by social media platforms. Often, no explanation is provided. I am concerned about this heavy-handedness and, at times, outright censorship.
...
Censorship doesn't fix the problems in science, but rather introduces new problems of its own.
...
We must be honest about retracting, deleting, censoring, and labeling articles as "false" -- this is not happening at random or even to the most egregious offenders. In the era of social media, there is a new dynamic.
...
The folks hired by social media platforms to handle adjudication are no doubt smart, well-intentioned people, but they are placed in an impossible situation as both employee of the platform and judge of the science. The temptation to simply side with the angry and vocal majority is likely too great.
...
I feel obliged to point out the slippery slope of our current science practice. Today, censorship of ideas is largely around issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic or papers that touch on social issues, but that is unlikely to be the case in the future. Attention could easily shift to less common topics.

In the future, the risk is that the myriad players in biomedicine, from large to small biopharmaceutical and device firms, will take their concerns to social media and journal companies.

On a topic like cancer drugs, a tiny handful of folks critical of a new drug approval may be outnumbered 10:1 by key opinion leaders who work with the company. On a topic like devices, doctors bullish about a new device may far outnumber those with concerns.

We run the serious risk that one corporation will persuade another corporation to silence dissenting opinions. Given the breadth and reach of these platforms, the resulting effect could be devastating.
...
We may have forgotten the reason we permit scientists to take gambles and say things that may in fact be considered wrong or stupid or harmful by the majority of their peers.

We do so not because most of these ideas are right, but because some tiny fraction of them might be.
...
Only dialog and argument can move us closer to the truth. Appealing to corporations to strike down speech and expunge all trace of it is a tactic of autocrats and tyrants and not scientists. We can choose to ignore, to rebut, to discuss, and to retract, rarely, when the grounds have been met, and only after a formal due process ensuring justice and fairness.

We should all care about censorship because of where we might be headed.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/vinay-prasad/89932
 
In France, the situation is improving, and this is due to what: the obligation to deprogram interventions?

The haccp method is used in the food industry, it makes it possible to point out the points and places of interventions.

For me, the closures of medical places at the start of the crisis would be a real plus. And this is demonstrable, already because it is the historical situation for all colds and gastro. I'm doing this text, following this:

Covid-19: French people infected long before the first official cases testify for the first time

https://www.les-crises.fr/covid-19-...s-officiels-temoignent-pour-la-premiere-fois/

https://presse.inserm.fr/le-sars-cov2-circulait-probablement-en-france-des-novembre-2019/42169/

- Given the rules for the movement of humans, a virus may have circulated from China, to France, without it awakening anyone

- Considering the capacities of the French doctors, one can have 176 suspected cases and 13 confirmed cases, without having seen anything. Considering what some people have to say about China, it would be good to look at the French system. By the way, as the details are accessible, these are not cases that only consulted local doctors ...


choices and values ??of the stress measurements implemented:

although we know that this disease is a nosocomial disease, we never discuss the possibility of closing medical units. However, it is in the food industry the first rule: to dry up production at the source ... I do not remember that we want to eradicate human listerias, etc.

- basic medicine: when we see the layout of a German and French medical practice at the start of the crisis, there are things to say. The worst part is that we got used to it. It's the same thing every year:

is it necessary in an epidemic phase to force an old woman to go to a waiting room for the renewal of her prescriptions?


- hospital structure: the non-publication of figures and information on cases of hospital nosocomial disease is a disgrace in France. There, things are better, it seems, it is strange because this can be the consequence of the obligation to postpone hospital interventions. This is presented to the French as a drop in luck, but is it really the case? for example, what happened in the gastroenterology departments, throughout the crisis, it is a disease of the lungs, but it is found in the stool, so what about in these departments?

it would have saved how many lives at the start of a crisis to postpone all non-vital interventions for three months, to wash, train and implement the quality approach which has never been implemented in a hospital environment.


Now that the doxa is vaccines, is it strange the silence on the nosocomial disease file, with staff who are partly vaccinated and therefore potentially almost all potential healthy carriers?



In animals we can produce production animals with strong genetics and germ free. . Knowing their method learns a bit about what should be done, for humans, ..
 
First, I agree with Sharon, that the best way to expose thoughts and ideologies that are not scientific is to air them out, in open conversation, such as Flutrackers. Thanks for having this discussion.
Second, there are another group of people who wish to create a commission to explore the trajectory of the covid19 pandemic, similar to the 9/11 Commission, exploring what errors of omission or commission may have contributed to the magnitude of the disaster.
 

Attachments

I haven't read anything about the experience feedback process from the Wuhan military games. I was hoping to read about it before the Olympics meet in Japan.

There are security protocols accepted by both sides, already for staff who in the context of sports monitoring have regular samples, therefore accessible ...
In the context of a sports competition, it is not secret defense or?
 
drlipton said:
First, I agree with Sharon, that the best way to expose thoughts and ideologies that are not scientific is to air them out, in open conversation, such as Flutrackers. Thanks for having this discussion.
Second, there are another group of people who wish to create a commission to explore the trajectory of the covid19 pandemic, similar to the 9/11 Commission, exploring what errors of omission or commission may have contributed to the magnitude of the disaster.
Click to expand...

I have been asked to offer my opinion on these and I will do so publicly.

I think the COVID commission piece is over-the-top political. There are reasons to have a commission that are not politically biased. Timeline and facts should be the drivers - no political rhetoric needed. Also, the pandemic is not over. A commission procedure should be performed after the crisis years are over. The process will be more thorough as "hindsight is 20/20". We are still in the fog of pandemic.

--------------------------------

Yes to some type of support for long term health problems, etc. I have not studied the compensation issue yet as we still do not know the full extent of the pandemic caused issues. I think we have only begun to feel the repercussions. The authors should change the title from "How to Make It Right....." to something else. There is no way to make it right.

I have advocated for a world court regarding this pandemic since early last year. Each country will probably also have their own review.

All hearings should be conducted according to established international law.
 
Interesting, bertrand. Fauci would like to share vaccines with India. I agree - we are doing well with the combination of targeting vaccines to the vulnerable combined with natural immunity. Why should we hoard? The statesman opposed to sharing has no medical background.
""The United States is committed first and foremost to an ambitious and effective campaign to vaccinate all Americans," said U.S. diplomatic spokesman Ned Price on Thursday."
https://www.state.gov/biographies/ned-price/

I don't want a former CIA agent deciding if I or anyone else should be vaccinated. That is a medical issue. The same thing happened internally when the federal goverment would not surge vaccines to Michigan. It was bean-counter that decided that, not a doctor of any sort.
 
Emily : Thank you, if diversity is an asset, it has been the source of many conflicts. When, for real or false health reasons, we break the agreements of respect, for example by touching the mortuary rites, only believers, from my point of view, can envisage the possible ones.

This gentleman should be, as a matter of urgency, automatically withdrawn.
 
Agree with many points in this Russian article - but one. Even if censorship supports my own beliefs, it is still censorship and will be noticed as such.

https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum...-2-under-stress-role-of-distorted-information
Control of informational coverage of an epidemic on TV media sources.
Click to expand...

The next suggestion is not censorship, IMO, but it is easy for me to think that. The virologists would be countering media/politcal fearmongering rather than supporting it.

Fixing persistent myths, misleading media images and video clips that are going viral in the web, with further professional analysing their mythical character by virologists and other expert researchers.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top