I don't want to speak on behalf of Sal, but I would like to point out that I have seen a lot of posts on similar topics on Mander.xyz. I think it's worth waiting for Sal to comment on this before people get the pitchforks out.

I will also point out this from the sidebar of mander.xyz:

Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instance’s local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.

This is something that I talked to Sal about before creating !publichealth@mander.xyz, and I was satisfied with the answer at the time. Everything intersects politics at some level, and those intersections are more prominent in some topics. Mander.xyz is an academic focussed instance, and it tries to carve out a space for constructive conversation the communities that are hosted on it. Sometimes it's not the topic that is the problem, but the quality of the specific article that is being posted.

Also, that particular community is supposed to be about 'General discussions about “science” itself', and if you look at the very old posts, they were meta discussions about the scientific method and scientific research. It seems to have taken a new life over the years though.

It's also possible that the comment section was the concern, and maybe it was easier to remove the post instead of carefully going through all the comments. I think Sal has earned a chance at speaking about this before the pitchforks.