I actually agree almost entirely with this, and I further appreciate your positive glass-half-full take on the debate and the motivations behind it, that it’s p

I actually agree almost entirely with this, and I further appreciate your positive glass-half-full take on the debate and the motivations behind it, that it’s political. Generally speaking I’m also not a fan of the government censoring political views. (I’m not sure that happened here. The article is making accusations of coordinated government censorship, but admitted the accusation lacks evidence. It’s possible many people independently decided against hosting the GBD because of it’s political bias.) There are a couple of reasons I think this particular political view does cross the threshold and amount to mild disinformation, which are that the stakes are far higher than most political debates. This isn’t a tax or budget discussion, it’s an ongoing pandemic with an outcome of millions of premature deaths so far. The GBD did speculate on both the unknown future harm of lockdowns and the safety of herd immunity. It also attacks and contradicts the conclusions of many many fellow scientists and epidemiologists based on speculation and not established facts. Part of the issue for me is that free market policies tend to externalize damage caused by deregulation, here for example by comparing human death today to unknown amount of human suffering, and (as in this case) they make a sort of unfounded social Darwinism argument that presumes pure economic policy can and should be applied to everything non-monetary. This has been especially true for the last century when it comes to the environment; we’re just starting to pay the real costs and asses the real damage from 100+ years of failure to take enough action and properly regulate pollution, a time during which it was argued constantly that the free market would minimize the total harm. I don’t know how history will look upon the lockdowns in 10 or 100 years, and I feel like lockdowns suck just as much as everyone else does. But people dying sucks hard, we’re all fighting fiercely over what is the lesser of two bad outcomes. Without evidence to back it up though, it’s hard to say yes we should let more people die because we think in the long term it might be less “total harm” if we do.