Free Speech On The Pandemic

The latest bolus of revelation hawked up by Elon Musk’s pet journalists is that, shockingly, the United States government urged Twitter to try to keep information about the Covid epidemic scientifically accurate.

This, of course, is an offense against the free speech rights of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, sellers of ivermectin, men who don’t want to wear masks, and Pepe the frog, among others.

There are ways to know what works against a disease and what doesn’t. Apparently Musk lives in a bubble where he just has to think it, and it is true, just as Donald Trump can mentally declassify documents.

The sad thing is that, whatever Musk may believe about free speech or the way science works, he’s not terribly different from a lot of the American public, or, for that matter, from a public health establishment that says that controlling the epidemic is up to each of us individually, according to our individual preferences.

Back in February 2020, I was a pessimist. Where the consensus seemed to be that the problem would be over in a couple of weeks, I thought it would last a couple of months or more. I half-remembered the ebola outbreak in 2014 and the immediate response to it by WHO and CDC. That took two years to control, but the amount of time it impinged on my consciousness was less.

Testing, tracing, isolation, development of a vaccine. I figured the CDC would have a team on the West Coast in no time and the cases would be mopped up.

That didn’t happen. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I won’t rehash all of them here. The most damaging was the CDC decision to develop its own test, and, even more damaging, President Donald Trump’s denial followed by his hawking of fake remedies. CDC’s decision wasted time and allowed the disease to spread, and Trump’s ignorance set up the politics that we are living with today.

The public’s desire for there not to be a pandemic has been strong, as if wishing could make it so. The willingness to take physical measures to control the pandemic, not so much.

So we still are losing 3000 people a week to covid, and the suite of winter respiratory diseases is worse than in many years. Pediatric wards are full of sick children. Wearing masks indoors and improving ventilation in public building would lower the numbers of sick and dead. A concerted effort from those who would not associate themselves with Pepe the frog, like David Leonhardt and Nate Silver, along with public policies that make it difficult not to go to work and not have children in school convince people that this is just something we must live with.

I can understand why the Biden administration hasn’t taken a stronger position on measures to control the epidemic. The assaults on cabin attendants when masks were required for air travel were an indication. Republicans in Congress are getting ready to vote down the minimal funding that has been in place for vaccines and free tests to the public. Funding for building modifications and mandated sick leave aren’t going to happen.

I don’t know when this ends. Three thousand deaths a week. Far too much virus in circulation. Unknown long-term effects. I’ll continue to mask up and stay home a whole lot more than I’d like to.

Update: This NYT article is, wow. Things are better in Santa Fe than what the article describes – about an equal mix of masked and unmasked in the grocery stores, and socially, people are okay if you mask. Of course, David Leonhardt is the Times’s go-to person on covid risks.