MisInformed Consent
will 2022 bring accountability?
If I want to know the definition of a term, I know better anymore than to look online, given the number of crucial terms that have been redefined this year: “vaccine,” “anti-vaxxer,” and “gain-of-function research,” just to name a few.
So when I saw that yet another person was banned from Twitter for violating “its COVID-19 misinformation policy,” I started to wonder whether the actions that government officials, media outlets, and social media platforms are taking, to censor information about the risks and efficacy of the vaccines (and boosters), as well as the availability and effectiveness of various treatments for COVID-19, could be said to vitiate, to render null and void, informed consent by those who are taking the vaccines.
My OED edition is too old (1933) to even contain the term, but my 1990 Black’s Law Dictionary is up to the task:
It seems to me that so much that is being done these days by government officials and bureaucrats, by healthcare administrators as well as some doctors, by mainstream media editors and publishers, as well as by social media platforms and their “fact-checkers,” interferes with the dissemination of information about “risks involved” in taking COVID-19 “vaccines”—particularly if their standard is whether the information shared contributes to “vaccine hesitancy.” Similarly, anything that any of the above parties has done to intentionally discredit or interfere with the dissemination of information about early treatments available for COVID-19, treatments that thousands of “reasonably prudent physicians” have recommended and prescribed for their patients, as well as analysis which questions the effectiveness of the vaccines or “approved” treatments, seems, by definition to be actively interfering with the right to informed consent.
Many of us already understand where moral culpability lies for censoring this information. Should any or all of these parties be held legally liable for their role in preventing individuals from “intelligently exercis[ing] their judgment by reasonably balancing the probable risks against the probable benefits”?
2022 could be a great year to find out.
*Of course Twitter’s choices have been not only immoral, but also impractical. Take the banning of Dr. Robert Malone, which has only served to make people more curious about what he has to say, likely resulting in millions of additional views for his marathon interview with Joe Rogan.