GIVEN THE PATHETIC RECORD OF THE “EXPERTS” ON THIS SUBJECT, LETTING EXPERTS CONTROL SPEECH ON A PANDEMIC IS CRIMINALLY STUPID: When Feds Controlled the Conversation About a Pandemic.

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the model of a marketplace of ideas in which strong arguments drive out the weak has sometimes taken a beating. Erroneous theories of the virus and how it spreads, bogus data interpretations, and ineffective therapeutic ideas have spread faster than sober correction could keep up. Although the federal government was itself the source of no small amount of misinformation and confusion — most notably, though not solely, in former President Trump’s rambling White House briefings on the virus — some progressive thinkers remain convinced that the most serious way to fight a pandemic is for Washington, D.C. to lay down a central messaging line based on the thinking of authentic experts. With that line set down, so the theory goes, the other institutions of civil society, from the media to professional groups to local officialdom, should fall in line and reinforce that messaging. (Today, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee pressured Facebook, Google, and Twitter to do more to take down misinformation about Covid vaccines.)

Trouble is, when governments have achieved serious control over conversation about pandemics in the past, they’ve been known to make things much worse. Front and center is America’s experience during the lethal flu pandemic of 1918, which occurred during the wartime presidency of Woodrow Wilson.

To be fair, Wilson was arguably our worst president ever. So far.