Vaccine/Censorship
 Vaccine/Censorship  | |
|---|---|
| Interest of | • Roberto Burioni • Nathalie Van Raemdonck |
There are few subjects as that bring out official condemnation as strongly vaccine skepticism. Nicknamed 'anti-vaxxers', any sort of questioning will find themselves under heavy corporate and state censorship and subject to paternalistic and draconian state measures.
This is regardless of any actual vaccine-skeptic arguments, like:
- ethical/religious grounds;
- scientific - or lack of faith in the integrity of often profit driven and corrupt scientific studies;
- skepticism against what seems to be a big pharma driven push;
- military/covert war applications of vaccines;
- a reaction to certain messianic proponents of vaccines as the 21st century panacea;
- the dramatic increase in number of vaccines routinely used the last half century;
- questioning of the cost/benefit;
- connections to severe side effects in a certain percentage of cases
- or other grounds - including ignorance.
'Anti-vaxxers' are a broad group, and the censorship supporters often pick examples from the more outré anti-vaccine claims, ignoring and lumping together all criticism as based on pure ignorance, if not direct malicious intent.
Censorship of 'anti-vaxxers' is often used as a wedge issue to further general censorship, and often finds support even with people who otherwise oppose political censorship, and large sections of the alternative media.
Social media corporations routinely hide and ban vaccine-skeptic views, and governments and international organizations have set down task forces to clamp down on vaccine skeptics/opponents ('vaccine hesitants' as they are called in the many studies of them[1]).
The World Health Organization said anti-vaccine views were a "top 10 global health threat" in 2019.[2]
Vimeo
From June 2019, the video platform Vimeo bans "content that perpetuates false or misleading claims about vaccine safety", because it "can cause material, real-world harms". Using newspeak, the company stated "starting today, we are providing a 30-day grace period for documentaries that contravene our policy on vaccination content so that creators can voluntarily remove those videos. At the end of the grace period, we will begin removing anti-vaccination videos that haven’t been voluntarily removed."[3]
Related Quotation
| Page | Quote | Author | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Josep Borrell | “Disinformation in times of the coronavirus can kill. We have a duty to protect our citizens by making them aware of false information, and expose the actors responsible for engaging in such practices. In today's technology-driven world, where warriors wield keyboards rather than swords and targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns are a recognised weapon of state and non-state actors, the European Union is increasing its activities and capacities in this fight.” | Josep Borrell | 10 June 2020 |
