Was Censorship the Greatest COVID Threat to Freedom?

“WE’RE NOT JUST fighting an epidemic,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, declared at the Munich Security Conference on February 15, 2020. “We’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous.” Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney expand on that concept in The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. Since Simon is a former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where Mahoney currently serves as executive director, it is not surprising that they see state efforts to suppress inconvenient information as part of the problem that Tedros described.

That makes sense, since authoritarian governments in countries such as China and Russia contributed to the “infodemic” by censoring, discrediting, and intimidating journalists and other observers who tried to tell