Another Hot Take on Vaccination

Declan O'Scanlon is a New Jersey State Senator.  Twitter recently temporarily banned the Republican from their platform after he twat the following missive:

Given that we have crushed Covid with a combination of natural immunity and voluntary uptake there is no reason anyone should be compelled to take the vaccine. Restrictions/mandates/vaccine passports all uncalled for.  https://t.co/m7UF09WwAx

The link at the end of that tweet takes you to another tweet that links to an article in the Daily Mail in which a man who claims to have invented mRNA vaccine technology says that the risks of the covid-19 vaccine outweigh its benefits in people under 22 years old.  (Parenthetically, this guy does have patents to DNA vaccines and mRNA vaccines.)

In response to the temporary ban, O'Scanlon said: 

That that tweet somehow triggered an algorithm, or worse some hyper-sensitive Twitter employee with an agenda ... is outrageous.  There was no misstatement of fact, and there was a legitimately and respectfully stated opinion.  This is Orwellian and everyone - on all sides of every social media debate - should be scared by this outrageous overreach.

This is why people hate politicians.

You can't yell fire in a crowded theater.  I didn't make that up.  Oliver Wendell Holmes said it--in fact he said "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic .... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.  It is a question of proximity and degree."  Schenck v. U.S., 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919).  Justice Holmes was a Republican.  Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican whose visage is chiseled into Mount Rushmore, put him on the Supreme Court.  This is not a left-wing socialist communist Antifa Squad Pelosi Marxist CRT-addled position.

And, of course, Justice Holmes was talking about when the government can silence speech, not private citizens or corporations.  It doesn't apply to Twitter.

What if I went on Breitbart and made the following comment in every posting: "Reading Breitbart makes you impotent because, in my opinion, all you commenters sound like limp dick motherfuckers."  I'm pretty sure I would be banned from Breitbart at some point.

Similarly, I could go onto the Fox News website and post comments that watching Fox News makes you less informed.  I could point to these data:

I could point to studies from 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2020.  I could point to Rudy Giuliani's being disbarred for his involvement with the kraken.

I wouldn't necessarily do this all in one comment.  I could pile on, day after day, highlighting all the bullshit they shoveled over the past 24 hours.  It would not surprise me if I lost my posting privileges at some point.  Fox News doesn't have to foster my speech on their website because they aren't the government (but don't tell Sean Hannity).

The folks at Twitter sanely believe that, given the ongoing pandemic that killed over 600,000 Americans and another 3.5 million-or-so more people globally, telling people to avoid getting vaccinated because it's too dangerous is like yelling fire in a crowded theater and that these circumstances are "of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils" they don't want to deal with.  You don't have to like that view or agree with it (although if you hang out here you know that I agree).  Twitter is a company, not a government entity, so they can kick you the hell out whenever they want even if you don't present "a clear and present danger."

Now, if you want to have a rational conversation about eliminating a vaccination, we could talk about polio.  There hasn't been a case of polio in the United States since 1979.  That's before Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, Josh Hawley, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Elise Stefanik were born.  One hundred and sixty-seven people have received federal compensation for polio vaccine-related injuries since 1988, roughly five people injured per year.  I agree with mandatory polio vaccination--someone could bring it back after a visit to another country or, god forbid, a terrorist group could weaponize it.  But we've been vaccinating essentially everyone for over 40 years, potentially hurting five people a year, without a single outbreak.  No one complains about this, it's just the cost of doing business.  Why on earth wouldn't we vaccinate everyone against covid when it continues to kill 200-300 people a day?  Oh right, because that might help this guy get reelected?

But he lost, so can we just prevent needless deaths now?