Suppressing debate on COVID-19 policies

China has abandoned its “COVid-zero” campaign, and with the loosening of social restrictions, the country has shifted its focus frompreventing COVID-19 infections to managing them. As part of that program, Li Guangxi, with China’s State Council Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism, gave an interview last month encouraging people to take Chinese medicine for severe COVID-19, specifically ginger and Chinese ginseng, “the best ginseng in the world.”

Are ginger and Chinese ginseng effective in fighting COVID-19? Who knows? Theremust be some studies out there somewhere. But that brief interview touting unproven medicines was startling. Think about what may have happened if an American scientist or official had given the same advice publicly. Hearing those recommendations, our medical influencers might have gone nuclear. A high public official in totalitarian China basically said things that conceivably could get a U.S. speaker censored or canceled by the American scientific establishment.

That’s not such a stretch considering the case of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya, a tenured Stanford University professor, was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal to protect high-risk populations rather than impose strict lockdowns during COVID-19. One of its points was keeping schools open during the pandemic.

Thanks to Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s release of internal communications from the previous regime overseeing the social media platform, we learned that Twitter secretly censored and shadow-banned Bhattacharya. (Shadow-banning is an internal mechanism that makes it hard to read what someone posts on Twitter.)

Upon learning of what Twitter had done, Bhattacharya tweeted, “The thought that will keepme up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt.”

Like the efficacy of ginger and Chinese ginseng, thegreat Barrington Declaration approach can be called into question — some parts may have been right; others may have been wrong. But the fallout from the dissent was clear. While he did not lose his tenure at Stanford, Bhattacharya was vilified and shunned by colleagues andmany in the Stanford community. He received virtually no support from the Stanford administration.

It is discouraging to witness the extreme tactics the medical community has used to keep its members in line during the pandemic. Public intimidation, harassment, personal attacks, retraction of scientific papers after publication and career sabotage have been carried out with an eye toward bringing any dissenters in line, making sure they self-censor and refrain from expressing their views on controversial subjects such as the origin of COVID-19. Reader beware: It’s as much what you don’t read aswhat you do.

The medical community can enforce dogma internally, but rigorous censorship of dissenting scientific views can be effective only with the assistance of other powerful actors. As the Twitter experience demonstrated, the role of tech companies, especially Facebook and Google, cannot be discounted. Their reliance on internal factcheckers and confidential editorial policies are often used as a means of controlling public discourse, and they have shown they favor a particular political vantage point.

Big Pharma has interests worth billions of dollars in the COVID-19 discussion, including vaccine development, emergency use authorization of drugs and future drug development. Questions that might adversely affect the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry concerning any of these subjects are not especially welcome — but are necessary.

The real force multiplier for censorship of science is the government. The government must align closely with respected scientists and protect the public, but there is a fine line between that and reinforcing rigid scientific orthodoxy. By withholding National Institutes of Health grants, which some universities require a candidate to have before receiving tenure, the government can chill scientific opinions from academia it doesn’t like.

Critics will point out that scientists must be vigilant against frauds and hucksters. True enough — therewill always be charlatans and flimflammery ready to exploit the public. There will also be crackpots who deliberately disseminate false information along with the well-intentioned who unknowingly spout untruths. The best remedy is not to shut those opinions down, but to explain to the public clearly and consistently why they are wrong.

COVID-19 is a lesson in how censoring opinion and suppressing debate stifles the approach to difficult scientific issues and creates mistrust in scientists and public health officials. In any scientific issue, impartial and open discussion is eminently preferable to “trust the consensus.”

To make informed decisions, the public must have access to many voices.