The cult of Covid censorship is finally being broken

Even in universities, free debate was sacrificed on the altar of infection control. That’s changing

A few days ago, Stanford University hosted the first major university-sponsored conference where different viewpoints on the appropriate management of pandemics were aired and debated. The event, Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past, was long overdue.
For much of 2020-2022, critical debate about the wisdom and effectiveness of mandatory Covid policies – lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, test and trace, and school closures alike – was treated with deep hesitation at best and outright hostility at worst. University professors and students who publicly questioned the mainstream consensus were censored on social media, vilified by their colleagues, and, in the case of Covid vaccine mandates, fired by administrators. Social pressure was harsh – almost Stalinesque.
Universities failed in their mission to promote academic debate and freedom during the most significant domestic policy issue of this century. This abdication of responsibility encouraged the climate of groupthink and censorship that predominated among much of the intelligentsia during the Covid years.
During these years, colleagues and students with critical, sceptical viewpoints and countless members of the public approached us, asking why institutions of higher education were not hosting reasoned debate. They were right: few such events took place.
Public health officials sacrificed the understandable desire for an open exchange of ideas on an altar of infection control; it was supposedly too dangerous to let the public see that there were qualified experts who disagreed on the wisdom of lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, social distancing, and vaccine mandates. Now, of course, the evidence increasingly questions the effectiveness of these measures and draws attention to their harms.
The pandemic taught us a valuable lesson for those interested to hear. We need more freedom of expression and academic debate during crises and emergencies, not less.
Yet a small sub-culture of scientists and journalists who supported destructive policies like school closures and vaccine mandates continue to denigrate efforts to promote thoughtful debate about the pandemic. They fear an honest appraisal of these ideas.
Before the Stanford event, LA Times business writer Michael Hiltzik wrote a column asserting that the university was “throw[ing] a party for purveyors of misinformation and disinformation about Covid”. A San Francisco newspaper erroneously averred that the panellists were mostly “Fauci-hating anti-maskers”. And, Yale epidemiology professor Gregg Gonsalves claimed that “our top schools are embarrassing themselves” by even hosting a scientific conference.
A new generation of students (who lived through the harms of lockdowns and school closures) will increasingly see such smears for what they are: childish, ad hominem slurs.
Many are tired of the vapid arguments of ideologues and hungry for a return to the long-standing academic tradition of debate. University leaders are recognising this cultural hunger. Jonathan Levin, the new Stanford president, noted in his opening remarks at the conference that faculty and students alike should “join in the larger project of trying to make Stanford and other campuses forums for the type of robust and thoughtful discussion that is at the heart of universities when we’re at our best.”
By that standard, the Stanford Covid conference was a huge success.
The panels addressed key issues regarding the evidence for Covid lockdowns, the management of information and censorship, the impact of lockdowns on the world’s poor, and the contentious question of the origin of the virus, from a lab or nature. Panellists provided a wide variety of perspectives on each of these topics, often civilly but sharply disagreeing.
Experts who supported early school closures reasoned together with those who did not. Those who support the lab leak hypothesis argued their case with those who disagree. Experts advanced arguments about the use and misuse of randomised control trials. They clashed on the ethical responsibility of Western governments to the global south. And they disagreed about the wisdom of social media censorship in a pandemic.
In the end, the conference achieved its stated purpose: to bring serious thinkers and scientists into constructive dialogue with one another.
Thus far, the likes of the UK Covid inquiry has provided a largely one-sided view of experts’ opinion on Covid policy, favouring early and sharp lockdowns and other aggressive interventions. We hope other universities follow suit and permit debate about the Covid pandemic years and how best to manage future pandemics so that everyone comes to understand that there never was a consensus in favour of lockdown, only an illusion of one.
Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at the Stanford School of Medicine and an organiser of the Stanford conference. Kevin Bardosh is the director and head of research at Collateral Global, a UK think tank that supported the conference.