YouTube keeps removing information people need about the virus, as we know, but now the Wall Street Journal, rather a significant platform, is blasting them for it. The most recent example comes in the form of an article by Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, who later this week will once again be my guest on the Tom Woods Show.
Bhattacharya writes about the panel of scientists advising Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, and the roundtable discussion they recently had that YouTube decided needed to be hidden from the public.
The other panelists were Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Scott Atlas of Stanford.
Writes Bhattacharya:
But last week YouTube removed a recording of this routine policy discussion from its website. The company claimed my fellow panel members and I were trafficking in misinformation. The company said it removed the video “because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
Yet the panelists are all experts, and all spoke against requiring children to wear masks.
The scientific evidence is clear. Consider a study from Iceland conducted early in the epidemic when masking was uncommon. The study used a representative sample to track the source of Covid infections. The authors used contact-tracing methods paired with genetic sequencing analysis to establish precisely how the disease spread. The senior author of the study, Kari Stefansson, later told reporters that “even if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease to others than adults. We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents.” Many studies in the scientific literature reach a similar conclusion: Even unmasked children pose less of a risk for disease spread than adults.
And he continues from there.
Bhattacharya has been a hero throughout the entire crisis, and has taken enormous abuse and been on the receiving end of wild accusations — for example, that he must be in the pay of radical libertarians (as if one would need to be bribed in order to point out that lockdowns destroy lives).
Poster Comment:
The Tom Woods video was taken down.