Have you ever known the WHO or any other major medical organization to get it wrong?

Hard to imagine, I know. They are The Science™, after all. And by now we all understand that science only advances when everybody is required to regurgitate what the people in charge all insist we believe.

During the COVID pandemic, some misinformers actually believed that vaccination against the disease did not prevent the infection of recipients or their transmission of the virus to others, even though we were reliably informed that they did by all the Best™ scientists. Shutting those dissenters up was a good thing, the conspiracy theorists!

The WHO, the FDA, the CDC, and others are infallible, and their advice should never be subject to questioning and/or debate.

That is why we should be relieved that YouTube has updated its COVID-19 misinformation policy to now cover all medical misinformation, ensuring that there is complete unanimity of messaging on the platform. We will all bow down to the WHO.

Imagine if YouTube had been around over the last 200 years.

It would have banned criticisms of blood-letting, thalidomide, lobotomies, and sterilizing the mentally ill, all of which were recommended by official health authorities.

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 16, 2023

As I have mentioned many times in the past, lobotomies were considered gold-standard care for decades and its inventor received a Nobel Prize for creating the operation. It is unthinkable that anybody should have been allowed to decry such an unquestionably helpful practice. Thank God that will never happen in the future!

I especially like how loosy-goosy this policy is. Since YouTube won’t specify which WHO or “health authorities'” policies may be questioned and which may not, you are encouraged to simply shut up about everything. Also, YouTube acknowledges that WHO might turn on a dime and reverse course, but they warn that until Google decides to change its own standards you may or may not be able to change what you say.

It’s like a lottery!

This is all part of the WHO's master plan to censor the worldhttps://t.co/daF2dotpdd

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 16, 2023

Another great thing that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy is how public health authorities now take it upon themselves to declare all sorts of things “public health” issues. You can fit almost anything under this umbrella, such as income distribution, power generation, economic activities, transportation, or anything else.

Health, after all, is about human well-being. And human well-being is about more than biology. I remember way back when in 2020 when the George Floyd riots were justified as addressing a public health crisis. Would YouTube censor criticisms of the riots as contrary to public health authorities?

Let’s assume, for the moment, that public health authorities never get it wrong or that they respond immediately to evidence that they did, and hence this policy was unambiguously good for everybody’s health.

Would it then be a good idea?

No! And here’s why: any tool this powerful will become a playground for tyrants, using it for whatever ends they have in mind. Everything becomes public health all of a sudden. Climate change is a “public health emergency.” Systemic racism. Hate speech. Dissent from Leftist orthodoxy of any kind.

This policy is a speech version of civil forfeiture, which was designed to seize property from drug dealers (sounds good), and now is being used to seize anybody’s cash or nice car and force you to fight to get it back. Prove you aren’t a criminal. From targeting drug dealers it transmogrified into a license for the government to steal.

As this policy is a license to censor whatever you like. Shut up. This is what the authorities want you to believe. At least today. Tomorrow it might be different.

I would have much less trouble with this sort of thing if Big Tech companies weren’t near-monopolies, but they are. They are the de facto enforcers of a social credit system, pressured by the government to keep the plebs in line.

Back in the heady days of the 90s techno-libertarians looked forward to an era when free speech would flourish as government couldn’t monitor everything on the web; it was too big and too flexible.

No longer. The government has just deputized Big Tech to become their enforcer.