[quote nojudgementhere]@Beadebaser - If you had genuine statistics to back up what you were saying then no it shouldn't be censored. Some of the data makes uncomfortable and conflicting reading but hiding this away and pretending it's not there doesn't help anyone. I think you have to have more faith in other people's ability to make judgements on their own vulnerability and risk, otherwise we will become an autocracy and that's something any of us should be wishing for. The government and scientists have unfortunately chosen to infantilise us and not trust us at times with the correct information as they feel (rightly or wrongly) that they should be making decisions on our behalf. This obscuring or manipulating of the truth instad makes people uncomfortable and creates a breeding ground for consipiracy theories which help nobody. I get that you want to protect people and I respect that, but I think that can easily be misconstrued as controlling or patronising if you are not careful.[/quote]
Going along with this, from the very beginning it was clear that there was severe misunderstanding of a lot of things in the public. Most notably "flatten the curve" While many people understood what that actually meant, a sizeable portion of the population latched onto that phrase without knowing what it meant. They understood it to be something along the lines of actually ending covid, stopping the pandemic. There was an understanding of it lasting for a few weeks, then we'd be back to normal.
The thing is, "flatten the curve" was never any of those things, and true, the governments and experts never said explicitly that it was, however, there was very little effort put into correcting the common misunderstandings because those misunderstandings supported the end goal. Sort of a case of it not mattering why a person does it, so long as they do.
And as things dragged on, very normal people started feeling like they had been assured of something that ended up not being right.
A similar thing happened with the vaccines. Early on, they were way oversold in relatively absolute terms...if you are vaccinated, you will be safe from covid, you will not have to wear a mask, things like that and a sizeable portion of the population took that at absolute face value, and since that misunderstanding supported the vaccination efforts, little was done to clarify the language...the vaccine will probably keep you safER from covid... It wasn't until breakthrough infections started being noticed in numbers that caught the medias attention, that the messaging changed to the vaccine lessening symptoms.
Those types of things, especially in a higly polarized, political, tribal environment may serve the ends in the short term, but any short term gains are utterly destroyed by the lack of trust it fosters.