Freedom to hold ..

accepted opinions

Replica of the Statue of Liberty, courtesy of Wikimedia

Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy blogs about (yet another) university professor punished for presenting an inconvenient opinion: Canadian Professor Suspended for Comments Criticizing COVID Vaccination of Children.

The case centers around Patrick Provost, a professor of Microbiology-Infectiology in the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval (Québec), who apparently presented a paper at a December conference arguing that the risks of COVID vaccines outweigh the benefits for children. This position is in line with that provided by a number of other scholars, including Martin Kulldorff, Alan Salzberg and Abraham Wyner, Marty Makary, Paul Offit (also here), and others.

His university decided to suspend him for eight weeks without pay for these comments. In the wake of a rash of recent faculty and student cancellations, it seems increasingly clear that academia is largely unable to present independent research and perspectives where there are strong interests involved.