Calls to silence an intellectual opponent is clearly an implicit admission of defeat, an admission that you have no faith in your own ability to make your case. Calls for censorship have abounded in recent weeks, when legislators and various medical professionals have called for silencing those who do not completely accept that “all vaccines are safe”. Dr. Peter Hotez prominently called for censorship of vaccine skeptics on Joe Rogan’s podcast, refusing even to consider a forum to debunk the “anti-vaxxers”. This clearly baffled Rogan, who couldn’t believe that someone who considered those ideas so dangerous would refuse to debate them. Here is the relevant part of the interview:
The anti-vaccine lobby owns the internet? The pharmaceutical industry is by far the biggest lobbying group in D.C., they air the majority of advertisements on television, in effect owning the government and the media. Social media has been a place where vaccine skeptics and health choice advocates can meet and discuss their concerns. Hotez takes the cowards way out, refusing to debate, and instead advocating censorship of these people, taking away the one public forum where they can convene.
More recently, three Yale professors and one pediatrician pulled out of a debate with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine safety at the last minute. Kennedy took the 3,000 mile flight to Connecticut anyway, and gave a four-hour press conference instead. If the other side is so confident in their ideas, why are they afraid to debate? The answer is obvious: they aren’t confident in their position. Kennedy would’ve humiliated them in a high-profile public forum and the footage would’ve garnered wide attention. The ensuing fallout would very likely have triggered a national debate where vaccine-skeptical ideas were given serious attention. It would’ve triggered a revolution and restructuring in vaccine policy. It would’ve been a healthy change, and all due to open debate. But the corrupt and intellectually bankrupt do not want debate. They want to keep their highly-paid jobs and their faux influence. But to do so means defending the laws and regulations that artificially animate their employers.
