That was a special case. They messed up and retracted it. They thought the N95 mask shortage would harm healthcare workers and wanted to save the top masks for those most at risk. They realized they were wrong and changed their views.

Can as much be said for anti vaxxers? Did they make the mistake and recant it? Did they change their view with new evidence? No, they're misinformed and close-minded. They ignored millions upon millions of safe vaccine uses, pointing to unsubstantiated edge cases and ridiculous conspiracies. The CDC was not buying into such rubbish and I hope they never do.

Right. But what happens before it's retracted? The incorrect position of the authority is repeated, and now in this case is basically denied distribution by Youtube.

Now in this case youtube is probably right "scientifically", but what if they weren't like with masks? You basically have 0 discussion or challenge allowed to the authorities position.

And lets just bring in the recent controversy here, a panel of scientists said third shots shouldn't be administered. Yet the government decided they should. Which position will youtube censor?

Seems like your basic point is that no trusted authority should ever be wrong about something. I'm sure you would say, "No, that's not what I meant." But that seems like the only thing that could be implied by what you're saying.

You didn't address a very important point that the parent comment made which is that trusted authorities like the CDC are more likely to correct their mistakes whereas anti-vax propagandists will never retract their statements. That's part of what makes the CDC trustworthy compared to the propagandists.

The fact that the CDC or any other trusted public organization has technically made a mistake in the past seems like an irrelevant distraction. Haven't you ever had an argument with a spouse or family member where you called out something they were doing and they came back with, "Look who's taking."? And that felt like a bullshit tactic, right?

Accusations of hypocrisy are a really common fallacy in debate. They contribute nothing to the discussion at hand and are basically just an appeal to emotion. And what you're doing is just a version of that.

What if ISIS was right about the nature of God and we will all suffer hellfire in the afterlife?

There’s no obligation for YouTube to give terrorists a platform. Regarding a booster shot, I’m sure they will make reasonable calls, nearly exclusively only silencing bad-faith actors. Much like their policy towards CP or terrorist content.

There were other "special cases". Here in California and many other places in the U.S. committees were formed by non-medical people to decide who should get the vaccine first. Decisions were made not by whose more likely to catch/spread it first, but who was most worthy.

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-vaccine-firs...

From that article:

> Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

In fact, if there was a supply problem, the best populations to give vaccines to first may have been some of the most "privileged" people in our society (even if we don't like them). Frequent travelers, college kids who are going to party anyway, etc. (Of course, people who work in retail stores, or front like health workers were obvious groups that nobody disagreed with.)

The point is, _who_ got the vaccine first wasn't decided by science, but by politics.

I admit to fudging my eligibility in order to get the vaccine early. I may do this again to get the booster if I decide I need it.

"That was a special case. They messed up..."

Well good thing that'll never happen again, right? /s

Given the repeated failings and intentional or unintentional misinformation we've seen thus far, why do you believe them messing up is a "special case"?

Gonna have a tough time leading by misleading, for whatever reason that may be

If it was illegal to point out they are wrong, would they have retracted it or protected their ego?

Two wrongs don’t make a right, do they? Also this is one of the most misquoted incidents in this saga, you don’t seem to know exactly what happened there.

Good-faith vs. bad faith.

I hate that the CDC did that action, only because it gave skeptics another reason to distrust them. But it is 100% clear to anyone who, you know, was alive when it happened that they did that to prevent a mask shortage for those who needed them most.

I would rather have seen some emergency declaration that N95s must be seized from stores and go to healthcare workers, but that would have caused perhaps an even bigger panic. Because then, everyone would have freaked out, vs. what they did. Now, we only have people who were already going to distrust government giving a shit about the mask declaration last year.

Back to good-faith vs. bad-faith: I'm not certain there is more than a hair's worth of anti-vaccine content that is produced with good intention or even attempted to be backed by statistics. Put simply, I wager there is no anti-vaccine content produced out of a legitimate, well-founded public interest. It's charlatans, fools, anti-science and anti-authority interests.

What's your position on the current third shot issue? Should we listen to the scientist panel that said no, or the government that said yes?

What is youtube's position? Will it delete all government communications because the scientists said on, or will it delete all scientific discussion because the government said yes?

Let’s not add misinformation here. It was a panel of researches at the CDC that said the evidence for boosters for under 65 at risk individuals was marginal that the thought it wasn’t worth it. A similar panel of researches at the FDA said it was a close call but they said it was worth it. The CDC panel is advisory to the FDA panel, not the other way around. The debate here is specifically for under 65 at risk individuals.

Besides, the official recommendation was more on the line of "a 3rd dose is much less useful than applying those vaccines on the antivaxers". What is very clearly correct, but is of a laughable political naivety, because the preferred goal is practically impossible to reach.

That's irrelevant, as I understand it. The debate wasn't about the scientific merits of a third shot - the debate was on the prioritization of whether the limited resource (the vaccine) was best allocated for a larger set of boosters, or if they should be used for others who are not yet vaccinated (perhaps worldwide).

Anyway, like I've said in another post and in a blog before, I think Youtube has less responsibility to be a neutral platform than ISPs and registrars do. If you want to host content, you should be able to do it yourself with Internet connectivity and DNS - IMO those should be "common carriers" that don't get the privilege of bias the same way platforms like Youtube do.

Think swallowing a tube of veterinary-grade medicine is safer than an injection that hundreds of millions of people have gotten with few problems? Go for it, on your home server with a domain name.

Now, I'm gonna get some coffee.

Go read the studies directly and see if you can spot a mistake in their methodology that would undermine the study.