Heated debates over what course of action is justified in the coronavirus saga are continuing unabated.
The official line is that there is no effective drug to cure people infected with the virus, and no vaccine to prevent it. The official line is also to aggressively suppress any alternative opinion, such as that hydroxychloroquine, normally used to treat another illness, malaria, has proven to work against coronavirus as well.
And while in some parts of the world the drug is now officially used prophylactically (that is, as preventive treatment), in the US, some studies are finding it to have no more than placebo effect (but causing no actual harm, either), Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci, has come out against his fellow doctors who promote such treatment very forcefully.
They are “a bunch of people spouting something that isn’t true,” this immunologist has told MSNBC.
“Not effective” is Fauci’s verdict, while citing what he calls a somewhat vaguely valid clinical trials and good studies.
But for some reason, the MSNBC host took Fauci’s “not effective” to mean, “dangerous” and asked this doctor if he agreed more needed to be done to stop people learning about the stance of his “dissenting” colleagues – whose ranks are now said to number hundreds.
Since March, online and offline media controlled by centralized platforms and corporations have engaged in widespread censorship of a broad range of content that doesn’t fit into the official, World Health Organization-driven policy, so it’s unclear what more could be done on that front.
Earlier this week a video reporting from a gathering organized by the Frontline Doctors group, that was shared by President Trump, got censored and removed from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
Fauci, however, agreed that “more should be done,” adding that his way of helping fend off what the host described as conspiracy theories was to be “very explicit and unambiguous when we say we’ve got to follow the science.”
The host asked Fauci, “don’t we have to do more to stop these dangerous conspiracies from misleading people?” The doctor replied “Yeah, you’re absolutely correct, Andrea.”
With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more all deleting content that recommends hydroxychloroquine and even going as far as suspending doctors’ accounts over it, it’s hard to imagine what “more could be done,” to censor.
