Neil Youngs music removed from Spotify

That would mean ignoring the needs of our already-overwhelmed hospitals and medical professionals, and the needs of all of their patients -- both those seeking medical care for covid and those seeking care for everything else. Until serious illness from covid is a relative rarity (an outcome for which vaccines are unequivocally effective, and highly so), vax cards and/or negative tests remain a social necessity.

From what I've read, the folks fired (or who quit) due to vaccination requirements amounts to about 1% of the medical workforce, so if that's accurate no, I don't think it'd really help much to hire them back.

ETA: on second thought, the bigger issue here is beds. More beds with covid patients means fewer beds for everyone else. Hiring more nurses or doctors doesn't fix that problem in any way. You can't (re-)hire your way out of a facilities issue. So even if that 1% figure above is way, way off, I'm still of the same mind.

Given the staffing strain, it was proposed that positive HCWs could work in N95s if minimal symptoms but few (if any) places had that actually happen.  The biggest thing was reducing "quarantine" from 10 to 5 days - but that;s supported by current evidence that max transmissible period is 2 days prior and 3 days post symptom onset.  Nobody's really clear on what testing positive and being asymptomatic but vaccinated  means re: risk stratification but usually assumed lower risk.

A response from Spotify: newsroom.spotify.com/2022-01-30/spotifys-platform-rules-and-approach-to-covid-19/

"A decade ago, we created Spotify to enable the work of creators around the world to be heard and enjoyed by listeners around the world. To our very core, we believe that listening is everything. Pick almost any issue and you will find people and opinions on either side of it. Personally, there are plenty of individuals and views on Spotify that I disagree with strongly. We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users. In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.

You’ve had a lot of questions over the last few days about our platform policies and the lines we have drawn between what is acceptable and what is not. We have had rules in place for many years but admittedly, we haven’t been transparent around the policies that guide our content more broadly. This, in turn, led to questions around their application to serious issues including COVID-19.

Based on the feedback over the last several weeks, it’s become clear to me that we have an obligation to do more to provide balance and access to widely-accepted information from the medical and scientific communities guiding us through this unprecedented time. These issues are incredibly complex. We’ve heard you – especially those from the medical and scientific communities – and are taking the following steps:

Today we are publishing our long-standing Platform Rules. These policies were developed by our internal team in concert with a number of outside experts and are updated regularly to reflect the changing safety landscape. These are rules of the road to guide all of our creators—from those we work with exclusively to those whose work is shared across multiple platforms. You can now find them on our newsroom, and they’ll live permanently on the main Spotify website. They are being localized into various languages to help our users understand how Spotify assesses all content on our platform.
We are working to add a content advisory to any podcast episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19. This advisory will direct listeners to our dedicated COVID-19 Hub, a resource that provides easy access to data-driven facts, up-to-date information as shared by scientists, physicians, academics and public health authorities around the world, as well as links to trusted sources. This new effort to combat misinformation will roll out to countries around the world in the coming days. To our knowledge, this content advisory is the first of its kind by a major podcast platform.
We will also begin testing ways to highlight our Platform Rules in our creator and publisher tools to raise awareness around what’s acceptable and help creators understand their accountability for the content they post on our platform. This is in addition to the terms that creators and publishers agree to governing their use of our services.
I want you to know that from the very first days of the pandemic, Spotify has been biased toward action. We launched a variety of educational resources and campaigns to raise awareness and we developed and promoted a global COVID-19 Information Hub. We donated ad inventory to various organizations for vaccine awareness, funds to the World Health Organization and COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) to increase vaccine equity and supported the Go Give One fundraising campaign. And we established a music relief project to support the creative community. While this is not a complete list, I hope it gives you a sense of how seriously we’ve approached the pandemic as a company.

I trust our policies, the research and expertise that inform their development, and our aspiration to apply them in a way that allows for broad debate and discussion, within the lines. We take this seriously and will continue to partner with experts and invest heavily in our platform functionality and product capabilities for the benefit of creators and listeners alike. That doesn’t mean that we always get it right, but we are committed to learning, growing and evolving.

Daniel"

I think you can support NY and Joni without making a claim like that against Joe. Having listened to him for years, you couldn’t be more wrong. He cares very much about health in general and about getting more people healthy. Please listen to some episodes if you haven’t, I think you’ll be surprised.

I know you don’t post for any kind of recognition but I feel compelled to say once again that we’ll absolutely never be able to repay or thank you guys enough. My sincere gratitude. I certainly hope one day soon we’ll be far enough removed to stop pointing fingers and come up with real solutions moving forward to not put you guys in that position ever again 🙏🏼

Fair enough, Josh, ok, so, to what ever extent either the reality or the perception that COVID misinformation was being provided on the podcasts ( and that seems well documented ), hopefully, everyone’s considers what lessons can be learned and applied from this.

What some of us are trying to point out is that you can't just call things you disagree with "misinformation." Or, I guess you can, but millions of people are tuning you out. The doctors putting forth the ideas on Joe's podcast, even if you disagree with them, at least deserve a seat at the table so there can be an open discussion. Honestly, listening to the episodes with Dr. Malone and Dr. McCullough on JRE should be required listening for this particular thread. Otherwise, how do we even know what we're arguing about here?  I wonder if any reporters have bothered to ask Neil Young if he listened to those episodes?

If you had listened to both episodes you'd know that Dr. McCullough had Dr. Malone pass on the info that he had changed his stance on permanent immunity once omicron entered the picture.  Dr. McCullough has treated thousands of Covid patients, he's earned a seat at the table.  Disagree with him...fine...but silence him, or Dr. Malone, or Joe...no...not gonna happen.  

I think it's important to note that JRE used to be on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, Spotify, etc all at the same time...  He went exclusive with Spotify in 2020.  So, his show isn't nearly as available as it used to be, yet his listeners have gone through the roof.  You don't have to like it, I'm just telling you every time you say "misinformation" it becomes less and less meaningful.  People are flocking to these episodes for a reason and this may be shocking to you but the idea that the pandemic was not of natural origin and at least to some extent intentional and used for political gain is not such an unbelievable idea to A LOT of people.  I'm not touching VAERS again haha..but if you look at it and still see NOTHING then once again that is a level of faith and trust I'll never understand.