You are dismissing those (many) bodies who disagree with the Dutch findings because "that's just another government". It would be equally senseless to argue that the Dutch findings are wrong because "that's just another government funded University" Both statements amount to conspiracy theories.
Its also worth noting that the Dutch study doesn't dispute that Covid vaccine saved lives. Even if we assume some fatalities directly related to the vaccine there is no suggestion that these deaths came near to the number of lives saved by the vaccine.
OB
The article was about excess deaths relating to other causes including vaccines. It suggested further study.
“Unfortunately, vaccines are rarely studied for their ‘non-specific effects’ (such as potentially causing) patients to become more susceptible to other diseases,” Coverse said.
“Our government agencies and officials claim that the current excess mortality statistics do not implicate the Covid-19 vaccines as an identifiable driver, yet no studies are being undertaken into such non-specific effects. We imagine that they simply do not want to even consider these types of studies as their reputations are very much tied with the implementation of the Covid-19 vaccines in Australia.”
This is a bit of a read concerning the suppression of dissension of opposing views.
Here are excerpts. For this one of several
... These are just some of the many examples of censorship related to COVID-19. Beyond the large scale of the censorship phenomenon, and the wide involvement of tech companies in it, another unique characteristic of COVID-related censorship is its targets. Many of the doctors and researchers being censored by the world’s biggest technology companies are not fringe figures. As in the examples above, these are mainstream scientists, many of them leading experts working in prestigious universities and/or hospitals, some of whom have authored books and published dozens or even hundreds of papers and whose studies have been widely cited. Some of them are editors of scientific/medical journals and some are heads of medical wards or clinics.
This heavy censorship was done with the encouragement of governments (Bose
2021; O’Neill
2021), which cooperated with tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. For example, on March 7, 2022, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on tech companies to report “health misinformation” to the federal government and to step up their efforts to remove it (Pavlich
2022). Subsequently, e-mails released from legal proceedings have documented the ways in which government officials directly coordinated with tech companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor doctors, scientists and journalists (Lungariello and Chamberlain
2022; Ramaswamy and Rubenfeld
2022). In December 2021, an e-mail from the fall of 2020 was released via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. It revealed a behind-the-scenes effort by Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to his colleague, Anthony Fauci, head of NIAID, to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration and disparage its authors. In the email, Collins told Fauci that “this proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention,” adding that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet—is it underway?” (Wall Street Journal
2021).
Practices of censorship have also been used by the Israeli Ministry of Health (IMOH) and media against doctors and researchers whose views run counter to institutional orthodoxy. One such example is the Israeli Public Emergency Council for the Covid19 Crisis. The organization, which consists of leading doctors and scientists, was targeted by the IMOH and the media numerous times, including attacks on individual members of the organization (Reisfeld
2021).
Go to:
Censorship, the Backfire Effect and Public Outrage
COVID-19 censorship is, in part, an exclusion of the views of dissident experts as well as citizens who question the standard position. This type of censorship has been a feature of many other controversial areas in science and medicine, such as AIDS, environmental studies, fluoridation, and vaccination (Delborne
2016; Elisha et al.
2021,
2022; Kuehn
2004; Martin
1991,
1999; Vernon
2017). In fact, censorship has a long history, and its purpose is to suppress free speech, publications and other forms of expression of unwanted ideas and positions that may be perceived as a threat to powerful bodies such as governments and corporations.
Censorship of opposing or alternative opinions and views can be harmful to the public (Elisha et al.
2022), especially during crisis situations such as epidemics, which are characterized by great uncertainties, since it may lead to important views, information and scientific evidence being disregarded. Furthermore, the denial or silencing of contrary views can elicit public mistrust (Gesser-Edelsburg and Shir-Raz
2016; Wynne
2001). Studies have indicated that in situations of risk, especially risk that involves uncertainty, the public prefers full transparency of information, including different views, and that providing it does not raise negative reactions in terms of behaviour, but rather, helps reduce negative feelings and increases the public’s respect for the risk-assessing agency (De Vocht et al.
2014; Lofstedt
2006; Slovic
1994). As Wynne (
2001) warns, institutional science’s attempts to exaggerate its intellectual control and use knowledge as justification for policy commitments, while ignoring its limits, only alienates the public and increases mistrust...
Considering the extent of censorship reported during the COVID-19 era, and in particular the number of accomplished doctors and scientists censored and silenced, as well as the extensive involvement of tech companies, on the one hand, and governments, on the other, it is worthwhile investigating this phenomenon. The present study is designed to explore the subjective perceptions of well-credentialed, highly accomplished mainstream doctors and scientists who have experienced censorship and/or suppression after expressing non-orthodox positions regarding the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they dealt with it. Through interviews, we examine censorship tactics used by the medical establishment and the media (both mainstream and social media), and the counter-tactics employed by their targets...
Tactics of censorship and suppression described by our respondents include exclusion, derogatory labelling, hostile comments and threatening statements by the media, both mainstream and social; dismissal by the respondents’ employers; official inquiries; revocation of medical licenses; lawsuits; and retraction of scientific papers after publication.
Exclusion
Respondents reported how, at a very early stage of the epidemic, when they just began to express criticism or their different position, they were surprised to discover that the mainstream media, which until then had seen them as desirable interviewees, stopped interviewing them and accepting opinion pieces from them:
Neither X nor Y [two central newspapers in the respondent's country] wanted to publish my articles. Without a proper explanation. Just stopped receiving articles. It was quite blatant, that they stopped accepting articles expressing a different opinion from that of the ministry of health (MOH). The number of journalists who can really be talked to, who are willing to listen to another opinion, to publish, has been greatly reduced, and most health reporters today are very biased towards the MOH (#10).
Denigration
Respondents reported that exclusion was only the first step: shortly after that they started being subjected to defamation by the media, and disparaged as “anti-vaxxers,” “Covid deniers,” “dis/misinformation spreaders” and/or “conspiracy theorists”:
After that report came out…, I was front page of the Sunday Times… it said… X [the respondent name], a professor in A [the institution this respondent works in] is co-author of anti vax report… I was now, yeah…, I was told I was anti-vaccine (#9).
I have been vilified.… I’ve been called a quack…, an anti-vaxxer and a COVID denier, a conspiracy theorist (#13).
Recruiting “Third Parties” to Assist in Discrediting
One prominent tactic our respondents claim was used by the media to discredit them was the use of seemingly independent “third party sources,” such as other doctors, to undermine them, for example by writing defamatory articles:
I was shocked at what came out the next day in The Wall Street Journal… So here we had three of the most senior doctors with hundreds and hundreds of publications and scientific credibility to our resumes and …a major media outlet allowed a junior doctor to publish who has no academic standing or track record…[and] have him publish a defamatory piece (#6).
Another “third party” source used by the media, according to our respondents, was “fact-checking” organizations, a practice that is ostensibly meant to verify published information to promote the veracity of reporting. However, some respondents alleged that the fact-checking groups were recruited and operated by corporate or other stakeholders to discredit them and try to discredit the information they presented:
…the fact checkers are a source of misinformation, so though it may review something and say, Dr. X said something, but… they make a counterclaim. The counter claims are never cited in the data… they all trace back to the vaccine manufacturers or the vaccine stakeholders (#6).
you get the fact checkers…
The treatment of those who did not subscribe to the chosen narrative went way beyond dismissive. That was just another government spewing the approved narrative.
