it's very sad that we're faced with this total sea of bad faith, cos there's useful, informative & possibly even reassuring stuff to be said about risk, but which it's maybe not useful to say because it'll be seized upon by people whose job it is to scream REOPEN THE ECONOMY NOW https://twitter.com/danielhowdon/status/1253005427027120134

They are the enemies of a kind of Platonic form of a public sphere and sensible discussion / policy formulation because facts / honest modelling just gets chucked into an environment in which they'll be manipulated and misrepresented to the extent that they cannot be trusted.

The people prominently screaming about freedom of speech are not just the people most keen to play bad faith language games - to instrumentalise Bad Post-Modernism if you will! - not just the people most stifling it in discussions of colonialism, racism, liberation etc...

... but also stifling it in the sciences they all claim To Effing Love. We could be talking about individual risk among population groups in useful ways, but nobody wants to misrepresented as the dubious hero in an article on "CapX" or whatever the current ghoulsite du jour is.