World Health Organization (WHO) head Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus just urged social media platforms to work with the WHO to censor supposed “disinformation” about monkeypox.
WHO Director-General Dr. Ghebreyesus claimed that so-called “discrimination” online can “fuel the outbreak” of a viral disease while he also pushed media organizations and tech companies to work with the WHO to censor information about monkeypox.
Ghebreyesus referred to COVID-19 and asked for help from news media as well as social media to suppress any health information that it does not agree with.
“As we have seen with COVID-19, misinformation and disinformation can spread rapidly online,” he said. “So we call on all social media platforms, tech companies, and news organizations to work with us to prevent and counter harmful information.”
The WHO director-general claimed that online “stigma” can actually contribute to a pandemic. “The stigma and discrimination can be as dangerous as any virus, and can fuel the outbreak,” Ghebreyesus alleged.
For the media, monkeypox appears to have become the COVID-19. Ghebreyesus, an earlier week decision by Ghebreyesus, overruled the WHO expert committee that voted 9 to 6 in favor of monkeypox being a worldwide emergency. Ghebreyesus declared a worldwide emergency in health care for monkeypox, an unheard of act.
Online speech can be censored and make it look like censors are hypocritical. Sometimes, a story that was initially considered to be misinformation is later found credible. The late-found legitimacy of the Wuhan lab leak theory of COVID-19’s origins is an example of a topic where the “misinformation” of yesterday can become the widely accepted information of today.
The WHO was actually caught on camera spreading misinformation. WHO was notified of the misinformation in January 2020. tweeted, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.” Information from the WHO about COVID-19 transmission was later labeled “misleading” even by leftist Facebook fact-checkers.
The censorship of health information is not a new tactic. Media Research Center’s CensorTrack database logged over 800 cases of Big Tech censorship of the COVID-19 debate between March 17, 2020, and Feb. 3, 2022.
Ghebreyesus, who isn’t a physician, has both a masters and doctorate in immunology of infectious diseases at the University of London.
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