> content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects
The J & J vaccine was approved at the time, but was later banned for causing chronic health effects.
> claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease
Isn't that true of the covid vaccines? Originally, the proponents claimed that getting the vaccine would stop you from getting covid entirely, but later on, they changed the goal posts to "it will reduce your symptoms of covid".
> The J & J vaccine was approved at the time, but was later banned for causing chronic health effects.
That's not what happened. Authorities received rare reports of a clotting disorder and paused it for 11 days to investigate. That pause was lifted but the panic caused a crash in demand and J&J withdrew it from the market. Source: https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/06/j-fda-revokes-authori...
It seems like you are implying that the pause was lifted because they found nothing. That's not quite right. J&J vaccine killed 9 people, and the FDA issued restrictions on who could get it, limitations on who should get it, and warnings about the side effects.
Your source doesn't mention the nine deaths or the blood clotting side effect. It doesn't convey that there were legitimate, validated reasons for the pause and downgrade. "Rare reports" and "Nine Deaths" reads differently.
This highlights what’s so difficult with science communication.
Right here on what should be a technical minded forum, people don’t understand what science is or how it works. Or what risk is. And they don’t even challenge their own beliefs or are curious about how things actually work.
If the “smart” people can’t or won’t continuously incorporate new information, what are our chances?
> Originally, the proponents claimed that getting the vaccine would stop you from getting covid entirely
Some people don’t understand how vaccines work, so may have claimed that, but efficacy rates were very clearly communicated. Anyone who listened in high school biology should know that’s not how they work.
That policy catches and bans any scientists studying the negative health effects of vaccines who later turns out to be right.
1) YouTube doesn't know what is true. They will be relying on the sort of people they would ban to work out when the consensus is wrong. If I watched a YouTube video through of someone spreading "vaccine misinformation" there is a pretty good chance that the speakers have relevant PhDs or are from the medical profession - there is no way the YouTube censors are more qualified than that, and the odds are they're just be random unqualified employees already working in the euphemistically named "Trust & Safety" team.
2) All vaccines are dangerous and can cause chronic health effects. That statement isn't controversial, the controversy is entirely over the magnitude. Every time I get a vaccine the standard advice is "you should probably hang around here for 5 minutes, these things are known to be dangerous in rare cases". I think in most countries you're more likely to get polio from a polio vaccine than in the wild. On the one hand, that is a success of the polio vaccine. On the other hand, the vaccine is clearly dangerous and liable to cause chronic health problems.
> This would include content that falsely says that approved vaccines cause ... cancer ...
Cancer is such a catch all that we can pretty much guarantee there will be some evidence that vaccines cause cancer. Everything causes cancer. Drinking tea is known to cause cancer.
3) All policies have costs and benefits. People have to be able to discuss the overall cost-benefit of a policy in YouTube videos even if they get one of the costs or benefits completely wrong.
> I think in most countries you're more likely to get polio from a polio vaccine than in the wild. On the one hand, that is a success of the polio vaccine. On the other hand, the vaccine is clearly dangerous and liable to cause chronic health problems.
There are two vaccines, the oral that has attenuated ("live") virus and the inyectable that has inactivated ("dead") virus.
* The oral version is not dangerous for the person that recibes it [1], but the virus can pass to other persons and after a few hops mutate to the dangerous version. The advantage is that the immunity is stronger and it also stops transmission.
* The inject able version is also not dangerous [1], it doesn't stop transmission, but it also can't mutate because the virus is totally dead.
Most fist word countries, and many other countries with no recent case use only the inyectable version. (Here in Argentina, we switched to only inyectable like 5 years ago :) .)
Countries with recent case of other problems use a mix, to reduce transmission. (I think the inyectable one is also cheaper and easier to store.) (Also, a few years ago they dropped globally one of the strains from the oral one, because that strains is eradicated. The inyectable one has that strains just in case, but it can't escape.)
[1] except potencial allergic reactions, that are rare, but I also remember big signs with instructions for the nurse explaining in case of an emergency what to do, what to inject, where to call ... The risk is not 0, but very low. I wonder if the trip to the hospital to get the vaccine is more dangerous.
> Cancer is such a catch all that we can pretty much guarantee there will be some evidence that vaccines cause cancer. Everything causes cancer. Drinking tea is known to cause cancer.
I'm reminded of the Prop 65 signs everywhere in California warning "this might cause cancer"
> This seems like good banning to me. Anti-vaxxer propaganda isn't forbidden thoughts. It's bad science and lies and killing people.
Any subject important enough in any public forum is potentially going to have wrong opinions that are going to cause harm. While some people could be wrong, and could cause harm, the state itself being wrong is far more dangerous, especially with no dissident voices there to correct its course.
Edit: I see you're getting downvoted for simply stating your honest opinion. But as a matter of principle I'm going to upvote you.
Pfizer hid a lot of the damage done as did the others. A lot of people can die by the time books come out. [1] That's one of the many reasons I held off and glad I did.
Not every book that gets published is accurate, especially print on demand Amazon books with forwards by men like Bannon.
You know how many excess deaths there have been among the vaccinated? Now compare that to the unavaccinated for the same period. Make the same comparison with disability if you'd like.
Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater being illegal was used to make it illegal to oppose the draft (Schenck v. United States). So actually, since opposing the draft is legal, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is legal too.
You would be charged with inciting a riot, reckless homicide, etc regardless of the actual words you shouted to cause the deaths, but I see your point.
"Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" being used as an excuse for censorship is the surest way to know you are talking to someone who hasn't even started doing the reading. Even worse, they often (over the past very few years) self-identify as socialists or anti-war, and the decision was in order to prosecute anti-war socialists for passing out pamphlets.
If somebody says it, they not only don't care about free speech, they don't even care about having a good faith conversation about free speech. They've probably been told this before, and didn't bother to look it up, just repeated it again. Wasting good people's time.
The current law is dictated by the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision, and it's explicit that shouting fire in a crowded theater is very much one of the only kinds of speech that IS restricted. They literally use that example in the decision.
So.... I think you might be the one who didn't do the research. Thank you for attending my TED talk.
> To me and most folks that I know its a figure of speech, not a reference to the actual 1919 supreme court case.
A figure of speech meaning what? Most people, AFAICT, that use it use it as an widely-perceived authoritative example of something specific that is accepted to be outside of the protection of free speech, a use that derives from and its use in the Schenk v. U.S. decision (it is sometimes explicitly described as something the Supreme Court has declared as outside of the protection of the 1st Amendment, which clearly derives from that origin.)
Of course, reliance on it for that purpose has problems because (1) it was dicta, not part of the ruling, in Schenk, and (2) Schenk is a notoriously bad decision impinging on core political speech in its specific application, and whose general rule is also no longer valid.
I have no idea what it would communicate as “a figure of speech”, and if it is actually used by some people as a figure of speech meaning something other than what it literally says being an example of unprotected speech (including, though I can see how this use would have some logic, as a figure of speech meaning “a persistently popular, despite being notoriously wrong, understanding of a legal rule”) it is one that impedes rather than promotes communication.
> it is one that impedes rather than promotes communication.
Maybe it does, but the simple truth is that the vast majority of people who use the phrase have never even heard of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. or his fabulous mustache and probably have no idea that it ever even went to the supreme court.
> A figure of speech meaning what?
People typically use it as a stand in for any language that might be dangerous enough to others to be curtailed. IE - Inciting a riot, or instigating a stampede that gets others killed. To use the legal phrasing from Brandenburg v. Ohio - they use it to describe language that would instigate "imminent lawless action" which WOULD still be curtailed under current law.
> Schenk is a notoriously bad decision impinging on core political speech in its specific application, and whose general rule is also no longer valid.
Schenk was mostly overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio and in that decision justice Douglas actually specifically talks about falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater as "probably the only sort of case in which a person could be prosecuted for speech."
This is inaccurate. Brandenburg v. Ohio explicitly states the opposite.
Justice Douglas specifically talks about the "fire in a crowded theater" issue being one of the few types of language that is specifically illegal beginning on the bottom of page 456 below. It's a PDF file of the original decision.
"The example usually given by those who would punish
speech is the case of one who falsely shouts fire in a
crowded theatre.
This is, however, a classic case where speech is brigaded
with action. See Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 536-
537 (DOUGLAS, J., concurring). They are indeed insep-
arable and a prosecution can be launched for the overt
acts actually caused. Apart from rare instances of that
kind, speech is, I think, immune from prosecution. "
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/managing-harmful-vaccin...
From the two links in the post, Google fleshes it out in great detail, with many examples of forbidden thought.