Why doesn’t Big Tech want you to know about the Great Barrington Declaration?
Why has it been censored by Reddit and briefly shadowbanned by Google? And why is one of its authors the subject of a planned smear job by the left-wing Guardian newspaper?
You won’t find an answer in the document itself, that’s for sure.
The Great Barrington Declaration is a thoughtful, compassionate, science-driven petition calling for a more rational global response to the Covid-19 crisis.
It was initiated by three highly respected figures in the field of epidemiology — Harvard Professor Dr Martin Kulldorff, Oxford Professor Dr Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford Professor Dr Jay Bhattacharya — and so far has been signed by more than 235,000 concerned citizens, nearly 7,000 medical and public health scientists, and nearly 15,000 medical practitioners.
Like a growing number of scientists and non-scientists, the petition’s authors are worried that current coronavirus policy in many countries, including the U.S. and the UK, is doing more harm than good.
They say:
Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
They believe that ‘those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal’ and that only the vulnerable should be shielded.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
In no way is this an extreme position. Yet Big Tech has chosen to treat it as if it were in the same league as ‘hate speech’ or dangerous conspiracy theory.
At the weekend, Google shadow-banned the Great Barrington Declaration. If you tried searching for it, the first sites you were shown were ones that debunked it, such as a hit-piece in the rather dubious activist blog Byline Times which attempted to link the Declaration to ‘a Koch-funded network that denies climate science while investing in polluting fossil fuel industries.’
It also led you to a Guardian article seeking to dismiss the Declaration just because a few pranksters — quite possibly left-wing ones on a mission to discredit it — had signed using funny names like Prof Cominic Dummings and Dr Johnny Bananas.
Google has since relented under public pressure but why did it censor it in the first place? Who could possibly be harmed by exposure to a calm, considered refutation of the draconian ‘public health’ narrative being enforced by so many governments around the world?
So desperate was the Guardian to discredit it that it began digging dirt on one of the Declaration’s authors, Harvard Professor Dr Martin Kulldorff.
Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician and epidemiologist with 24,270 citations: hardly an irrelevant lightweight.
Yet as far as the Guardian was concerned, Kulldorff’s accumulated professional expertise was invalidated by the fact that he had once appeared on an internet radio show the Richie Allen Show which had ‘previously hosted multiple antisemites and Holocaust deniers as well as other conspiracy theorists.’
The fact that this smear-by-association method is now routine among scribblers of the hard left does not mean that we should stop being appalled and disgusted by how dirty, underhand and antithetical to free speech and open debate it is.
I myself recently appear on the Richie Allen Show. Richie is in fact an old school leftie — ‘a Socialist numbering Salvador Allende and Hugo Chavez among his heroes’ — who interviews a broad range of people on his show, ranging from neo-Nazis to gay rights activists to Islamist-supporting left-wing radicals like George Galloway. It’s called ‘journalism’. The idea that Kulldorff is in any way compromised by his appearance on the show exists only in the embittered imaginations of anti-free speech campaign groups like Hope Not Hate.
But to return to the original question there is nothing — absolutely nothing — within the Great Barrington Declaration which could possibly breach either Google’s or Reddit’s terms and conditions and justify closing it down.
So what reason could Big Tech possibly have for censoring it?
Those who have read Allum Bokhari’s terrifying Deleted will have a better inkling than most.
Big Tech has become so shamelessly left-wing that it is now barely capable of embarrassment about its relentless bias. Big Tech supports full lockdowns, enforced mask-wearing, quarantines, curfews and all the other authoritarian baggage because it aligns with its own interests in global rule by a technocratic elite, in ever bigger government, in the globalist new world order promoted by institutions like the World Economic Forum (Davos) and the Chinese-controlled World Health Organisation.
Increasingly it is flexing its muscles to suppress any dissent.
It’s why I personally believe that this presidential election is by far the most important political event of anyone living: if Trump loses, then Big Tech and their allies win and it’s game over for free markets, liberty, free speech or anything else that makes life worthwhile.
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