Google and Facebook are hiding the truth about coronavirus lockdowns
Doctors and the WHO are turning against lockdowns, but you wouldn’t know it from Google and the other tech giants who are trying to keep this news quiet, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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Finally, some two hundred or so days on from “two weeks to flatten the curve”, the worm is turning.
Everyone from the WHO to leading epidemiologists are admitting what has been obvious to the rest of us for some time now: long-term lockdowns are soul-crushing experiments that turn entire populations into guinea pigs, destroy not just economies but societies, and will leave a long trail of destruction far worse than anything that might be wrought by COVID-19.
Only, not everyone has gotten the message that lockdowns are out, and live with it is in.
In the world of Big Tech, which increasingly — and disturbingly — decides what we think and what we see, they haven’t gotten the message. And they’re trying to stop you from getting it, too.
But first, the WHO’s sudden and surprising reversal on lockdowns.
Speaking to Andrew Neil, editor of the UK’s Spectator, Dr David Nabarro said on the weekend: “We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus.”
This is huge, given their early positions on lockdowns, which had contradicted decades of the best advice about what to do in a pandemic such as COVID-19.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it,” he told Neil.
“And so, we really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method. Develop better systems for doing it. Work together and learn from each other.”
Dan Andrews, are you listening?
It was a huge statement from the WHO, which had not that many months ago advised countries to shut down movement in order to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
And it has massive implications not just for places like Melbourne, which is grinding through lockdowns and 5km movement restrictions with little end in sight, but also the entire debate over how we manage the coronavirus going forward.
In this the WHO joins a greater call from other leading doctors and epidemiologists who are saying, enough is enough.
Earlier this month three experts, Harvard epidemiologist Dr Martin Kulldorff, Oxford epidemiologist Dr Sunetra Gupta and Dr Jay Battacharya, epidemiologist and public health expert at Stanford, proposed a different way — and, as of the writing of this column, over 25,000 scientists and health practitioners have signed on to endorse their Great Barrington Declaration.
“As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all, including the vulnerable, falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity — i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable — and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimise mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity,” the declaration reads in part.
“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”
As with the WHO’s declaration, it’s quite the rejoinder to the armchair experts who claim that the only way to avoid “killing grandma” — to employ an overused rhetorical trick — is to keep the world’s societies on hold.
But there’s something else curious going on — even as the medical profession is changing tack, the tech giants are trying to suppress the story.
In what looks like a disturbing private sector version of the Great Firewall of China, Google users over the weekend reported that the Great Barrington Declaration’s website (www.gbdeclaration.org) wouldn’t come up in a search.
This is what happened when I looked for it on Saturday and Sunday.
As late as Monday, plugging “Great Barrington Declaration” into Google produced a page of results all sceptical of the document, including articles from left-wing, pro-lockdown publications like The Guardian and Mother Jones.
And it’s not just Google. Facebook users have taken screen shots of posts that do nothing more than point out the minuscule risk of dying for most age groups, taken directly from data from the US Centres for Disease Control, being hit with “fact checks”.
On Saturday UK author and general secretary of the Free Speech Union, Toby Young likewise reported that not only had the search giant disappeared the declaration, but chat site Reddit had also blocked posts about it.
So what are the lessons of all this?
One, that far from “the science” being a monolith, the medical and scientific communities are hardly in lock-step when it comes to lockdowns, or anything else to do with the coronavirus pandemic.
Those who fall back on “the science” to win their arguments — often claiming that those who would like to open up more of their economies are simply “killing grandma” to make a buck — are being disingenuous,
And two, there are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, have a lot invested politically and emotionally in continuing to spread fear and lockdowns.
Dr Gupta of the Barrington Declaration has rightfully called this instinct out for being religious, even “puritanical” in nature.
Instead, Gupta says the goal should be opening up more and more and as much as possible with an eye towards herd immunity.
Whether that is possible, all of us must recognise that better treatment options and risk management will likely make this thing about as dangerous as the flu before any putative vaccine comes along.