Attempts to censor Covid dissenters are sinister
Big tech should not be shutting down debate about this virus when the science is far from settled
It is hard to imagine a less likely menace to public safety than Karol Sikora. The professor of medicine and former World Health Organisation adviser is now a ubiquitous commentator on Covid-19 and has been dubbed the “positive professor” thanks to his aversion to panic and attempts to offer some perspective. And yet the good people at Youtube, apparently worried for their users’ safety, took down a 30-minute video interview I did with him this week on the grounds of “inappropriate content”. It had already been viewed more than 100,000 times.
Some weeks ago, Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced measures to remove “medically unsubstantiated” videos during the pandemic – including anything going against WHO guidelines. (She seems to have missed how controversial those recommendations now are, including for example, the advice only to wear a face mask if you’re actively caring for a Covid-19 patient).
Whichever flunkey had the task of vetting our interview obviously decided that something in it contravened this policy. They must have been quite convinced, as our appeal was rejected within 13 minutes. But what was the offending item? Despite having supported the lockdown, Prof Sikora told me that the virus is showing signs of petering out, that schools should come back, that there are already substantial pockets of herd immunity in the UK and that, ultimately, the global panic will prove more destructive than the virus itself.
In the headquarters of Youtube this may sound like heresy, but the truth is that all these questions are live debates at the highest levels of the global scientific community. Talk of “following the science” is absurd when eminent scientists still disagree on fundamental aspects of the disease.
This debate is eerily absent from the British political conversation, replaced with slogans and the pretence of omniscience at the daily Groundhog Day press conference. Clearly, it doesn’t suit either main party to ask questions about how bad the threat from coronavirus really is: the Tories are hoping to claim credit for averting the catastrophe of more than 500,000 dead that Imperial College forecasted, and Labour are hoping to convict them for not having done more, sooner.
It is left to a few media outlets to ask the more awkward questions, and it seems like the public want answers: our interview series on Unherd with dissenting epidemiologists has attracted millions of views.
Scepticism around the apocalyptic projections by Neil Ferguson that tilted us into lockdown refuses to die out. As the months go by, it is a remarkable fact that, of nearly 200 countries, each with wildly divergent levels of intervention, not one has shown anything like the levels of mortality that were predicted, with almost 1 per cent of the population dying.
Professor Sunetra Gupta, seen as the Oxford counterpoint to Prof Ferguson, told us this week that she believes that the most convincing explanation for this is that other types of immunity are protecting whole swathes of the global population (including in the UK) and that in many places the virus is already “on the way out”. If she is right, then countries that are currently held up as the “winners” of this pandemic, with very low levels of cases and deaths, have in fact only trapped themselves in a situation of pain deferred and indefinite anxiety, while countries that have apparently suffered the most will be able to return to normal sooner.
Nor is there agreement on whether the lockdowns have been effective. Sweden, which never imposed a legal lockdown, has fared similarly to the UK in terms of deaths per capita, and new serological tests suggest that more Londoners have had the disease than Stockholmers in any case.
As for the much-vaunted “test, track and trace” regime that the politicians keep talking about – is it even an appropriate goal for a country that already has such a well-established infection? A total of 65,000 people were recently tested in Seoul on the back of a single outbreak in a nightclub. We still have 2,500 new cases a day: if we tested the same number of people per new case, we would be testing the entire population of the UK twice over, every day.
Even the R rate that the Government is publicising as its metric for coming out of lockdown is controversial as it is very hard to measure with any confidence. This raises the uncomfortable prospect that we could be dragging out the exit from lockdown for months longer than necessary in fear of a theoretical number – when simply keeping an eye on numbers of deaths may be a more reliable approach.
After a campaign of support for us on social media, Youtube mysteriously reinstated the Sikora interview, citing “a mistake”. But the fallacy that its attempt at censorship speaks to – that the science of Covid-19 is settled and that any dissent is irresponsible – is itself dangerous. There is a lot we still don’t know about this disease, so let’s not shut down the debate: the truth may yet prove to be a lot less scary than we were led to believe.
Freddie Sayers is executive editor of Unherd