One would think that transparency would be mandatory when it had to do with people’s health

BY ADRIAN REECE

COVID-19 shook the world for years—quarantining countries and stripping people of their individual freedoms. Conspiracy theories were rampant during the lockdowns claiming that it restricted the rights and freedoms of most of the world. Misinformation and conflicting “truths” caused people to split over all information that came out during the course of the seemingly deadly virus.

Social media has for a while now been a source of information that is constantly updated and readily available. Many prominent and trustworthy news sources leverage social media to get information out to the public. Professionals of every discipline use social channels to provide information and updates on content relevant to their field to the general public in a less formal manner, while still maintaining 100% of the authority they hold in their professions. This content is subject to peer review. The content is public and a widely accepted practice that is almost encouraged to make correct information that much more accessible.

However, COVID-19 saw information disappear from social channels. Experts across every platform were silenced, banned, or their posts removed, hidden behind the guise of “giving out real information.” Doctors with years of experience, nurses who have been working in the healthcare field had their posts either shadow banned (the process of not letting others see their content), or outright deleted. Meta (the company that hosts Facebook and Instagram) was encouraged to censor information pertaining to the COVID-19 virus and vaccine.

Even experts who freely shared information on these platforms previously were being censored. Subject matter experts, with the intellectual authority to say what they want pertaining to a topic, had posts that were taken down, and professional reputations were in danger of being ruined due to the Covid information being spread.

The government seemed to want to push a particular narrative, and anything that didn’t align with that kind of information wasn’t accepted in the pipeline of allowable information. Measures like social distancing and masking were unnecessary. It made no sense as to why such measures were put in place when it can travel the same distance and space as the common cold. Also, the mortality rates of COVID-19 were widely unknown, many sources were relaying different information.

Healthcare professionals were talking about their experiences in hospitals with some doctors talking about how deadly it was while others were saying that the death rate was heavily exaggerated. We may never know the truth about what those rates really were, and what deaths were Covid related, or had other causes. Information about these sorts of things tends to come out generations later when people are no longer affected or interested.

Companies creating vaccines were not beyond reproach either, information related to the Covid vaccine was, and still is widely unknown to the general public. Companies wanted to release information regarding the contents of the vaccine in 75 years, or at the very least 10 pages at a time over a long duration.

One would think that transparency would be mandatory when it had to do with people’s health, but so much information was and still is hidden from the public eye that as more time goes by the truth will get more and more distorted until it is impossible to know what COVID-19 was really about and why we were forced to quarantine and take vaccinations for a brand new virus.