‘We have to let nature do what otherwise the vaccine would do and that is create people who are immune…’
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that he will censor anyone guilty of spreading “harmful misinformation” about the Wuhan coronavirus on the world’s largest social media platform.
That includes those who deviate from harsh governmental social distancing policies.
The problem, however, is that a number of medical experts advocate for “herd immunity” over social distancing.
The idea is that the quickest and most effective path to overcoming the virus, in the absence of a vaccine, is not avoidance but exposure.
The practice of exposure is common with childhood diseases such as chickenpox, but even without intentional exposure, those who experience asymptomatic, mild or nonlethal cases may develop resistance.
Some, in fact, have argued that a significant portion of the asymptomatic population may already have encountered the virus and accumulated the necessary antibodies without requiring treatment.
Zuckerberg intimated that such information will either be banned or come with a warning label.
ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos raised the issue during an exclusive interview on Good Morning America.
Stephanopoulos prompted the exchange in response to the growing number of protests around the country demanding that dictatorial blue-state governors restore constitutional rights and begin to work toward reopening the economy.
After Stephanopoulos — a former official in the Bill Clinton administration and longtime ally of the political family — claimed the protests were responsible for helping spread misinformation about herd immunity, Zuckerberg vowed to censor it on Facebook—and, by extension, silence alternative opinions to social distancing.
“There’s an awful lot of bad information out there,” Stephanopoulos said.
“How do you deal with the fact that Facebook is now being used to organize a lot of these protests to defy social distancing guidelines?” he asked. “If someone is trying to organize something like that, does that qualify as harmful misinformation?”
“Certainly, someone saying that that social distancing is not effective to stop the spread of coronavirus, we do classify that as harmful misinformation and we take that down immediately,” said Zuckerberg.
But more and more, health experts are talking about the necessity of herd immunity and the limits of social distancing.
Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a strong supporter of social distancing, but even he has acknowledged the benefits of herd immunity.
“The people who are infected, there is no doubt … that if you recover from an infection, you have an immunity that will protect you with the same particular pathogen, in this case, the coronavirus,” he told CNN.
Ironically, it’s social distancing that is preventing the country from achieving the herd immunity threshold needed to eradicate the virus and save lives, and that’s a bill that has to be paid, according to David Katz, the founding director of the Yale–Griffin Prevention Research Center.
Katz told Fox News host Mark Levin that while social distancing has helped mitigate the spread of the coronavirus thus far, once people venture outside again the infections will increase until herd immunity is achieved. Essentially, social distancing is delaying the inevitable, he said.
“That’s what will happen if you lock everybody away from everybody else and kind of wait until things get better and then let everybody out into the world,” said Katz.
“The virus is still out there,” he added. “We don’t have antibodies. We’ll just get it later.”
Knut Wittkowski, a former biostatistician at Rockefeller University, is taking an even stronger approach. Wittkowski is sounding the alarm online about the trappings of social distancing and may soon become a high-profile victim of Facebook’s new censorship policy.
He’s a leading online advocate against social distancing and has gained notoriety for saying schools should be reopened as a way to ensure enough people are exposed to the virus to achieve herd immunity.
“We have to let nature do what otherwise the vaccine would do and that is create people who are immune because they went through a very mild form of the disease,” he said.
Wittkowski has been negatively targeted by media “fact-check” groups and Facebook is relying on similar groups to implement its censorship policies. In his ABC interview, Zuckerberg assured Stephanopoulos that the fact-checkers will be “independent.”
A YouTube interview titled, “Perspectives on the Pandemic,” features Wittkowski and his view that “social distancing and lockdown is the absolutely worst way to deal with an airborne respiratory virus.”
The 41-minute video has gone viral across multiple social media platforms and has garnered more than 1.1 million Youtube views over the past two weeks.
The top viewer comment says, “The more I learn, the less I worry about this virus but I worry WAY MORE about our government.”