Meanwhile, actual science, medical practitioners, have been clear for many decades that vaccines reduce infection and transmission rates, etc.
Vaccines didn't "cure Polio" in any absolute sense, but they did make it possible to suppress it until it no longer appeared "in the wild" .. until it came back again.
Free speech beats the alternative. But it's important to realise that just because the media (or anyone) confidently claims something doesn't mean it's true (not generally because they're lying, just because they're wildly overconfident), and that's still true when they tell you what they're saying is "the science".
There isn't one alternative, speech rights & laws are a spectrum
It is certainly arguable that the American style is to extreme on the freedom side. There is little punishment for the immense amount of malicious lying by too many actors in the system
I mean, I would love to make it illegal for a journalist to say "The science says X" when the science does not say X, but understand that for nearly all science, a journalist is not equipped to know that!
Journalists are not scientists, and they are especially not scientists, and they do not have the foundation and fundamentals necessary to evaluate whether a paper backs up what a university PR department tells them to publish.
The wealth of human knowledge is insanely vast, and basically infinitely recursive. A scientist in one tiny niche of physics can barely evaluate the papers of a scientist in another tiny niche of physics. Most niches in most sciences can't even fill an auditorium with experts.
The most important thing to know in science is that if you are not reading the actual paper, you aren't getting scientific information but rather someone's interpretation and marketing copy. The second most important thing to know is that if you haven't written a scientific paper in the same domain, you will likely struggle to accurately interpret the results of one.
When everyone was freaking out over LK-99, none of the losers on here or twitter were able to accurately assess the situation, and plenty of people outright bought the lies of that russian furry who claimed to be able to reproduce it, despite any evidence. It took actual domain experts, who were always emphatic that it didn't have good enough evidence to get too excited.
There was a similar situation during the "Cold Fusion" nonsense in 1989. A couple chemists did some mediocre science and went on a PR tour with their "findings", quite literally saying their data was unquestionable and the rest of science needed to adapt their theories to the cold fusion data, which meanwhile was unpublished. These two fairly well trained and practiced scientists went and asked congress for something like $25 million on next to no data. An entire conference of Chemists cheered for them and their "findings". The findings were always invalid. Their experiments never generated the kinds of products you would expect from fusing deuterium.
If even a room full of trained chemists cannot evaluate other chemists making downright basic errors in their research, how can we possibly expect average people with no scientific experience to keep up?
I'd focus on politicians and corporations who lie through their teeth first, not journalists. I'd focus on the blatant and provably wrong statements, like where a politician says they did this thing to bring jobs to their constituents when in fact they voted against the bill
Oh absolutely, I've long railed on about how absurdly weak and pitiful "truth in advertising" laws are in the US, but suggesting that a homeopathic medicine should not be able to call itself a "remedy" or "medicine" or anything like that drives people absolutely insane in the US. How dare you ~take away~ slightly change the label on my sugar pills!
Consider that, if you pay someone to say something as a "testimonial", you can say basically whatever you want and face no legal consequences. It shouldn't be the job of the average consumer to take corps to court for selling shit based on lies, yet it is.
did you set up an independent printing press and the government came to shut you down? if so, yes, your right to free speech was indeed gravely violated!
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
This quote is literally from the director of the CDC (source in comment above). I mean.. who better to 'trust'?
It's the director of the CDC, it's not some rando on youtube. They mentioned the CDC data.
Don't be a skeptic now, trust the science. If we can't trust the director of the CDC, who can we trust? Some rando on youtube saying that vaccines won't protect you from getting and spreading covid? Oh wait.. we banned those people from pretty much every social network, and guess what, they were correct.
Come on.. be fair.. like really... if we were discussing this in the spring of 2021, and that interview was just on tv, and i said:
> "well, she said that vaccinated people won't get sick, won't carry the virus, but i think that she's wrong, she didn't say stuff correctly, vaccinated people will still massively get sick and also carry and spread the virus, her 'real world data' is bullshit, i want to see her sources, she's lying without those"
...what would you tell me? Would you say "yes, you're correct, it was just a human-to-human conversation, it was simplified, there's no data that her sentance is correct, there's no proof of what she said,..."? Or would you just call me an antivaxer?
Meanwhile, actual science, medical practitioners, have been clear for many decades that vaccines reduce infection and transmission rates, etc.
Vaccines didn't "cure Polio" in any absolute sense, but they did make it possible to suppress it until it no longer appeared "in the wild" .. until it came back again.