Coronavirus Censorship and Education

The coronavirus pandemic has brought about great changes in our world and in our daily lives. When the coronavirus all began, I predicted a few things that would happen very quickly, and one of them was censorship and new training and degree programs. I actually thought that these two things would take a little time to become reality, however, they are happening now. Censorship and removal of information contradictory to the mainstream program is already happening at a very fast rate. The biggest example, within the last week or so, was the pulling and deletion of David Icke’s interview on the London Real platform. Even though they knew this interview was happening, they let it continue live, however, this video was deleted from some of the major social media platforms, such as YouTube and Vimeo to name a couple. Now David is being investigated by a UK media oversight committee for releasing information that is touted to be false. Other alternative news personalities are also being censored, and apparently by artificial intelligence engines. As I was browsing through the publicly available information on the World Health Organization website, I found a document that outlines how to mitigate the dissemination of misleading information that may be causing a false perception. Now remember that this is coming from the organization that in many ways has medical martial law authority. I can understand the concern about ensuring that everyone is saying the same thing; however, what if what they are disseminating is wrong, or corrupt in some way? I have no solid proof in my hands that the mainstream nor the alternative news stories are 100% correct, but my concern is for the overarching plan for control of information, while not allowing freedom of speech. Here are a few excerpts from the “Risk communication and community engagement readiness and response to coronavirus disease (COVID-10)” document that I am referencing.

RCCE helps prevent “infodemics” (an excessive amount of information about a problem that makes it difficult to identify a solution), builds trust in the response, and increases the probability that health advice will be followed. It minimizes and manages rumours and misunderstandings that undermine responses and may lead to further disease spread.

The perception of risk among affected populations often differs from that of experts and authorities. Effective RCCE can help bridge that gap by determining what people know, how they feel, and what they do in response to disease outbreaks, as well as what they ought to know and do to bring the outbreak under control. Effective RCCE helps transform and deliver complex scientific knowledge so that it is understood by, accessible to, and trusted by populations and communities.

Goals: Assess the initial perception of risk among affected and at-risk populations.

Action Steps: Monitor the RCCE response by identifying processes that delay the release of information and create confusion among affected populations

Community engagement:

• Conduct a rapid risk perception analysis based on existing formal and informal information.
• Monitor possible barriers to the uptake of protective behaviours.
• Segment the audiences for the communication response.

Addressing uncertainty and perceptions and managing misinformation:

• Establish regular feedback and capture common questions, misunderstandings, and misinformation through health hotlines, health care workers and communities.
• Ensure that the results of monitoring traditional and social media are assessed rapidly through the team set up for this purpose.
• Engage with influencers to capture people’s perceptions through their feedback.
• Prepare guidance according to people’s perceptions and concerns, and repeat guidance through a number of information channels.

My reference to new education and degree programs has already begun to manifest. You can already go online at the World Health Organization website and find many different training programs. I am not insinuating that education concerning the COVID-19 and other coronavirus diseases is not important, however, I am amazed at how quickly these training programs have been created and published. I have seen many other sites with COVID-19 specific training as well, and I imagine that we see specific degree programs aligning to COVID-19 and similar pandemic situations. Here are a few that I have found:

http://www.phf.org/resourcestools/Pages/Coronavirus_Disease_2019_COVID_19_Training.aspx

https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Article/2117401/aetc-issues-official-covid-19-mission-essential-training-determination-authoriz/

https://www.intelycare.com/covid-19/training/

Essentially, training and certification courses have been developed and offered over a large spectrum of organizations. This type of activity is very similar to the reaction following the 911 attacks, whereby many new degrees and agencies were born. I suspect we will see the same level of activity to align with the COVID 19 pandemic. 

History certainly repeats itself, and here we go again….