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Does it make sense to attribute the lockdowns to 'censorship and propaganda' being 'deployed'? It seems to have, much moreso, been a 'decentralized consensus' among national, state, and local experts, media, bureaucrats, etc. It was bad, but the cause of the bad thing wasn't censorship and propaganda. Anti-lockdown censorship was bad, but it wasn't load-bearing. Being against lockdowns (and vaccines, etc) became pretty partisan, and I don't think less censorship would've made blue people change their minds back then. Would Rs have become more anti-lockdown?
Either way, censorship based on 'enforced government order' and voluntary censorship for non-personal motivations are quite different. Concerns with the views or actions of the media are different from concerns about 'the government controlling the media'. You make an argument for the former, but nothing for the latter. The media is bad, but bad in an entirely different way!
When it comes to whether lockdowns depended upon censorship and propaganda to exist is not relevant to whether we should regard organisations that were paid to put out that propaganda by states as state sponsored.
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They actually admitted to using propaganda several times. They decided as policy early on, to imply that masks don’t work (they later reversed course). They have admitted to trying to scare people into compliance by playing up the deaths (which is why there was major reporting on hospitals being overwhelmed, nurses and doctors nearing burnout (and dancing), and the ubiquitous “death clocks” in every major news outlet). It was a master class in narrative creation, down to the anti-opposition propaganda (misinformation!, anti-science, killing grandma) and the videos of people being thrown out of various stores for refusing masks.
I think COVID was a problem, and obviously people did die. It just turns out that unless you had a pretty serious health condition, if you were under 50, you could go on about your life and never get anything that much worse than a bad flu. And tbh, had we treated flu to the same level of propaganda, the results would’ve been roughly similar. People would absolutely panic, because more people than you think die of flu every year. We just don’t put up giant deathclocks on the nightly news.
This is false.
We can argue over exactly what rate of death and severe side effects is acceptable and what mitigations are acceptable to reduce those rates, but COVID-19 causes a lot more of both than any flu we've seen other than the 1918 one, including among the young and healthy. Previously young and healthy people becoming majorly disabled by Long COVID is something that happens, albeit rarely. I'm not sure where to get the best data on this, but the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season, but that's not counting post-COVID sequela which we know is significantly more common than with the flu but difficult to measure, partially because studies vary widely in their definitions. And it's unclear how to define a fair comparison because getting the flu rarely happens more than once a year and usually significantly less often while COVID-19 infections happening multiple times a year is common.
Mind, the flu poses very little danger to the young and healthy, so even a lot more dangerous than the flu can quite reasonably fit inside your acceptable risk profile. But treating them as the same is not accurate.
(And, uh, maybe it wouldn't be terrible if we took some measures to strengthen our protection against airborne pandemics like improving ventilation and accidentally reduced flu prevalence as a side effect.)
Which puts it in the range of the Hong Kong Flu and Asian Flu, two mostly-forgotten pandemic flus in the latter half of the 20th century.
We know no such thing.
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How much of this was due to mismanagement? Such as, the initial treatment plan of putting the sick on ventilators, which didn't work and basically consigned many to death who might have survived with some other basic treatment approach? Or how the Northeast US hit a death jackpot by putting sick people in nursing homes, which was like throwing a match on dry kindling? Not to mention the financial incentives for hospitals to mislabel deaths as "due to COVID" rather than "tangentially adjacent to COVID?" When the entire bureaucratic/media complex has a vested interest in proving that fear of COVID is warranted, I'm skeptical of the numbers they present to press their case.
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This is the wrong phrasing, since we already knew all that by February 2020. Propaganda and so-called opponents of disinformation instead propagated disinformation that it was otherwise.
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Didn't government agents (FBI and/or state department) request Twitter censor specific antivaxxers?
Hard to believe this was decentralized.
Perhaps a better word instead of 'government controlled media' is deep state.
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