When residents of Wuhan, China, began mysteriously falling ill in December 2019, the Chinese government quickly moved to quash news about the disease outbreak. That crackdown on information proved to be the perfect accelerant for the Covid-19 pandemic to take off and spread throughout the world.

Censorship has been a deadly component of the pandemic, asserts Joel Simon, who is co-author with Robert Mahoney of “The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free.” Simon is a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School and the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. 

“Instead of communicating openly with citizens, governments suppressed critical information or actively misled or confused their citizens, a strategy that has been dubbed ‘censorship through noise,’” Simon and Mahoney argued. “Alongside the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an infodemic, a deluge of lies, distortion, and bungled communication that obliterated the truth.”