The Censorship Trap

Back in July 2023, when RFK Jr was still seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, I wrote a post evaluating his candidacy and claims. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism occasionally reposts my articles in full (with a link back to the original source) and did so in this case. A couple of weeks ago, Yves emailed me to say that Google had threatened to demonetize her site based on 16 posts that allegedly violated their policy, and that mine was among them. She believes that the company “relied on algorithms to single out these posts,” and that the “AI results are plainly and systematically flawed.”

I think that any reasonable person who looked at the list of posts that were flagged would reach the same conclusion. But these are not just clumsy errors that can be easily corrected and quickly forgotten. They feed the narrative that free speech is under siege in America, and inflame precisely the sentiments that have attracted people to Kennedy. He has polled as high as 22 percent in recent surveys by well respected organizations—Quinnipiac, Reuters/Ipsos, and Harvard/Harris—and stands at 15 percent in the RCP three-way average. This is a sizeable group of voters, and they could well prove decisive in the election.

The following extract from my original post summarizes my view of Kennedy and his appeal:

Kennedy believes with a high degree of subjective certainty many things that are likely to be false, or at best remain unsupported by the very evidence he cites… But the evidence is ambiguous enough to create doubts, and the failure of many mainstream outlets and experts to acknowledge these doubts fuels suspicion in the public at large, making people receptive to exaggerated claims in the opposite direction.

Furthermore, the general themes that arise in Kennedy’s rhetoric—the corrupting influence of money in politics, the folly of military adventurism abroad, the smugness and failures of elite opinion, and the need for open and robust debate—will strike a chord with many voters across the ideological spectrum…

Kennedy’s bid remains unlikely to succeed, but if his party adopts a dismissive and contemptuous stance towards him and towards those whom he has mobilized, it will sink its own prospects. The proper and prudent response is to identify and absorb his legitimate concerns, while pushing back firmly but respectfully on the claims that lack merit.

Although Kennedy is now running as an independent, I stand by these remarks.

The failure to engage in robust and honest debate about contentious issues, and the inclination to target dissenters with ad hominem attacks, can lead to significant policy failures. Consider for example, this recent post by Paul Offit, a pioneer in the development of vaccines and a strong supporter of mandates early in the pandemic:

In May 2021, after about 70 percent of the United States population had been vaccinated, we hit a wall. About 30 percent of the American public simply refused to get a COVID vaccine, either because they thought the vaccine was unsafe or because they didn’t think COVID was that bad.

In response, we mandated COVID vaccines. We mandated them for travel, schools, restaurants, businesses, and federal employees. We mandated them for entry into churches and synagogues. We mandated them for sporting events; athletes who refused to be vaccinated weren’t allowed to compete… Early in the pandemic, mandates appeared to be the way to go. But there was, as it turned out, an unanticipated price to pay. Some public health officials now question whether vaccine mandates were a mistake. Here’s why. In 2023 alone, 48 states introduced 377 bills many of which addressed the legality of vaccine mandates and argued for more non-medical exemptions. For example, in April 2023, Mississippi allowed a religious exemption to vaccination. A few months later, 1,800 religious exemptions were granted. Prior to this ruling, Mississippi, because it had only offered medical exemptions to vaccines, had the highest vaccination rate in the country and, consequently, one of the lowest rates of vaccine preventable diseases. That won’t last. And Mississippi is just the tip of the iceberg. About 35 percent of parents now question the value of school vaccine mandates for all vaccines. Consequently, vaccine exemptions among school children have increased dramatically. It is not a coincidence that measles cases are how sweeping across the country; 15 states are reporting cases.

As a second example, consider the case of Francis Collins, who was among the architects of our pandemic response as director of the National Institutes of Health. On a podcast appearance first posted in July 2023, Collins expressed some regrets (the relevant clip is just 45 seconds long):

If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. Doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered… This is a public-health mindset, and I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset, and that was really unfortunate.

The video didn’t attract much attention until several months later, when it was posted on social media and picked up by more conventional outlets. While it is heartening to see some reflection of this kind, the lives versus livelihoods framing is misleading. Unemployment, learning loss, and social isolation don’t just affect the quality of life, they have downstream effects on morbidity and mortality. These ought to be factored into any public health mindset. Moreover, other mindsets also need to be applied to major policy decisions, even those concerned with disease suppression.

I was born at a time and place when small pox was still a deadly scourge, and have the mark on my left arm where the vaccine was administered. I had both measles and mumps at about the same time when very young, and though my memory of this is hazy, I’m told by my parents that my temperature reached 105 degrees and I could well have perished. I got my second dose of the Moderna vaccine in March 2021, just weeks before rushing to India, where my father was desperately clinging to life in the midst of the deadly Delta wave. I’m convinced that the vaccine protected me when I most needed it, and when others most needed me to stay healthy.

But even if none of this were true, I would hope that my arguments would be met with a presumption of good faith, evaluated on their merits, and allowed to circulate freely. Not because any of us is entitled to such treatment, but because we will all be better off in the long if we steer clear of the censorship trap.

Francis Collins on Braver Angels