Covid censorship jamboree

Worst of all, among professors

Covid Mania has broken many brains. One of the most devious cases of this is the way it has okayed censorship. And the good and the great are not immune. Sometimes they’re the worst.

Nick Hudson, actuary, investor and founding chairman of PANDA, was banished from Twitter yesterday. We know this process well. Big Tech is horrible. Here I focus on the way formerly noble people have rejoiced in this.

Tom Moultrie, professor of demography at the University of Cape Town (UCT), my alma mater, tweeted his support for Hudson’s deplatforming. He backs up this praise with reference to a claim Hudson forecast 10,000 deaths from Covid in South Africa, but the official tally is not ten times that.

I’ve not bothered to check if Hudson made the forecast. I don’t care. You shouldn’t either. The principle is key. In my day at UCT we knew it was unacceptable for a professor (anyone, really) to rejoice in the censoring of someone for getting a sum wrong.

That is enough to make the point. But it is worth looking at the content of the matter. There is strong evidence that deaths “with” Covid are far higher than reported, and that deaths actually caused by Covid are vastly exaggerated. Moultrie’s 100,000 is likely well off the actual number.

Moreover, nobody got Covid forecasts right. Many got them orders of magnitude more wrong than Hudson. The Spectator provides a good summary of this. Would the good professor have the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine cancelled, too? Or does he just find Hudson’s views unpalatable?

If Moultrie’s behaviour is anything to go by, David Benatar, UCT professor of philosophy, is right. UCT is falling.