Stanford's Stupid "Virality" Project

Pompous quango recommends censoring true stories of vaccine side effects.

By JOHN LEAKE

A Stanford quango that styles itself the “Virality Project” has appointed itself to stamp out COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy by issuing policy prescriptions to social media platforms. Stanford’s location in the heart of Silicon Valley places this outfit in an ideal position to pursue its objective and receive generous funding from U.S. government entities such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Judging by the content of its reports and e-mail advisories about “Vaccine Misinformation,” the Virality Project’s team started its work with the presumption that there is absolutely nothing about the COVID-19 injections to be concerned about, and anyone who questions their safety and efficacy is a crackpot. In other words, the proposition that the COVID-19 injections are safe and effective is not a matter of debate, but an article of faith.

Matt Taibbi recently tweeted an excerpt of a Virality Project e-mail that mentions the hazards of “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”

This reminded me of our recent trip to Australia in which we learned the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) led by Dr. John Skerritt, MD, PhD, made the decision to suppress accurate reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young people because such reports could cause “vaccine hesitancy.”

As these policymakers and regulators see it, the incidence of grave and fatal side effects are sufficiently rare to warrant censoring ANY reporting of them, as such reporting could cause the greater harm of “vaccine hesitancy.” By their calculus, severe injuries and deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines are the price we as a society must pay for the purportedly greater number of lives saved by the vaccines.

Never in the history of medicine has this calculus been used to evaluate the benefit of a medical product. Only in a military context—that is, commanders in the field must accept a certain number of casualties in order to achieve the greater benefit of vanquishing the enemy—has this logic been applied.