Debunking and exposing incorrect information is much more effective than supression.
"Suppression" just adds fuel to the "conspiracy theory" fire.
The debate over censorship might be an interesting one in another thread at another time. That’s not my real concern. My real concern is that Elon’s vision of reality does not map onto the leading Epidemiologists, Infectious Disease Docs and Virologists best understanding. And my main concern over that is I believe he needs the best understanding of reality possible, in order to make the wisest decisions:
- Elon thought the U.S. would be at zero new infections over 1 month ago. When asked about that last week, he claimed he was only 3-4 weeks off.
- On Joe Rogan, Elon stated the experts were off by 10X-100X on the fatality rate. This would mean no more dangerous than the flu.
- On Joe Rogan, he also claimed that there was a conspiracy between hospital administrators and doctors such that they’re filling out false death certificates.
So to sum up, Elon believes he was initially correct that CV was no more deadly than the flu, and when reality contradicted his initial thesis, he began adopting conspiracy theories being promulgated in certain right wing media.
The consensus of Epidemiologists is that:
- CV is at least 10X as deadly as the flu.
- It is far, far more contagious.
- In the U.S., we are only about 5% infected, meaning we’re less than 1/10th of the way through this nightmare.
- The virus will either continue throughout the Summer, or an even scarier possibility is that it may die down and after we let our guard down, come back with a vengeance in the Fall.
- Hopefully we’ll have a widely deployable vaccine in the U.S. early next year.
Now if everyone can convince me it is unimportant for a CEO to have his map of reality be that far off from expert consensus and therefore there’s no effect on his decision making, then maybe I’m concerned for nothing.