As bad as many celebrities/politicians are (I'm waiting/fantasizing for "cheeto in chief" to sit in the same jail cell as "bubba"), the real quacks are organized groups like Chiropractors, "Naturopaths", Multi-level-marketers, etc.
My medical insurance will pay for several literally fake/quack treatments because of this crap. If you want to wage war against Quackery I better see you going after "big Chiropractor" first.
Celebrities in general are quite dubous. See a certain actor suddenly promoting Palantir spysniffing on mankind. I decided that guy won't get a dime from me for the rest of my life - when actors suddenly become lobbyists for Evil, they need to not get any money from regular people really.
This is just normal not supporting things you disagree with. It's not a rule of thumb you can quickly use to discount an opinion. Ignoring actors is a pretty handy rule of thumb. Their main skill is repeating someone else's words and emoting. There is no reason to consider them smart, knowledgeable, informed, or competent.
Yeah, we should have a Ministry of Truth that declares things "quackery" or "misinformation" and then jails people for saying it. I can't see how this could possibly go wrong.
Quackery in what sense? It is my understanding that to be a quack in a legal sense one must first be a licensed doctor, and malpractice is covered by freedom of speech. But you referred to celebrities practicing "quackery" which I assume means that they were saying the same nonsense that could get a doctor's license pulled, and that is absolutely covered by freedom of speech.
Also, you have already admitted there is a Ministry of Truth equivalent, as such a thing is necessary to prosecute people for telling lies.
Idk the Danish approach of opennnes seems to be working for them. They acknowledge it isn't fully effective. They acknowledge that there may be a small risk of side effects. And they tell people it's worth it and to go take it.
"Since HPV vaccination was implemented in the Danish childhood vaccination programme in 2009, we have received 2,320 reports of suspected adverse reactions from HPV vaccines up to and including 2016. 1,023 of the reported adverse reactions have been categorised as serious. In the same period, 1,724,916 vaccine doses were sold. The reports related to HPV vaccination that we have classified as serious include reports of the condition Postural Orthostatic Tachycardi Syndrome (POTS), fainting, neurological symptoms and a number of diffuse symptoms, such as long-term headache, fatigue and stomach ache."
"The risk of cervical changes at an early stage was reduced by 73% among women born in 1993 and 1994, who had been vaccinated with the HPV vaccine compared with those who had not been vaccinated."
"The Danish Health Authority recommends that all girls are vaccinated against HPV at the age of 12. The Danish Health Authori-
ty still estimates that the benefits of vaccination by far outweigh any possible adverse reactions from the vaccine."
Its not like it wasn't without issues. You had the documentary from a state funded tv station that uncritically let people claim all kind of issues after getting the vaccine. It drastically lowered the uptake of the vaccine.
> They acknowledge it isn't fully effective. They acknowledge that there may be a small risk of side effects. And they tell people it's worth it and to go take it.
Those are basic bits of knowledge that apply to most vaccinations.
The problem is that the quacks diminish the positive effects, exaggerate the negatives and engage in a campaign of fear mongering that costs some people (and in some cases lots of people, see COVID) their lives. They are not only clueless, they are malicious.
From Gwyneth Paltrow, JFK Jr, all the way to Donald Trump and a whole raft of others the damage is immense. I have a close family member who now is fully convinced of the healing power of crystals and there isn't a thing you can do to reason with people that have fallen into a trap like that.
I think those who advocate for censorship are gullible and have fallen for the bush-league trap of believing that the state is on your side and exists to benefit you.
Telling lies should never be criminalized, because there is no single trustworthy arbiter of truth.
This has nothing to do with vaccines. There is a very good reason that misinformation is, and should remain legal. This simply allows the person or group who gets to define what is or is not misinformation to arbitrarily imprison anyone doing publishing they don’t like.
You really need to think through the implications and consequences of censorship laws before advocating for them.
> You really need to think through the implications and consequences of censorship laws before advocating for them.
Maybe I did?
It is possible that we just disagree on this. Clearly misinformation about medical stuff is so damaging that many places have found it necessary to have laws on the books. I'm just elevating this from a misdemeanor to an actual crime based on the outcomes.
What if 25 years ago I spoke out against opiods as highly addictive and dangerous. Remember, this was in contradiction to the scientific consensus at the time that modern opioids were not that addictive. A reasonable person could have said at the time that my claims were false and posed a danger to people who were in pain and needed this medication. In hindsight it's obvious that the scientific consensus was catastrophically wrong, but it people like you were in charge, people could be jailed for their dissent.
If you did you'd have been in very good company because the world over the scientific consensus was that opioids were addictive.
That scientific consensus you are alluding to is not what you claim it was.
Finally, we're talking about celebrities without any qualification whatsoever spreading utter nonsense causing real harm, you can look at that in isolation and compare it to you making that statement out of an abundance of caution regarding something where there is no downside. The two simply are not equivalent. Free speech absolutists always pull the same trick, aiming to refuse an obvious wrong in order to defend their bastion while forgetting that there isn't a black-or-white at all, you can have some reasonable limits on what people can and can not do and in the age of 'influencers' with global reach the danger is much more prevalent than it used to be.
Free speech is a great good, but it is not the greatest good.
