Pennel Bird
libertynation.com
Pennel bird is a writer, educator, musician, husband, and father who currently lives in Glendale, CA. He likes Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain.
As a rogue wave of censorship breaks hard across the landscape of American life, two videos of doctors testifying under oath in the Senate on various COVID treatments were swept away in the suppressive social media tsunami. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held hearings in 2020 to provide a forum for experts from the medical world to discuss various drug protocols that have shown promise or success combatting COVID-19 – the symptomatic expression of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But Google-owned YouTube recently saw fit to black-hole the videos, citing “inappropriate content” – the vaguely obtuse and nefariously non-specific phrase increasingly weaponized against free speech.
The maddeningly uneven application of platform “standards” seems only to impact those on the right and anyone else who gainsays the menu of views it is acceptable to hold – according to four guys in Silicon Valley named Mark, Jack, Tim, and Sundar. Curious that. The new normal of content curated according to the personal politics of our Big Tech Overlords feels fascist on its face and yet alarmingly apt for this American moment.
Senator Johnson tweeted:
“Social media censorship just ratcheted up to a new level. Google’s YouTube removed two videos of doctors testifying under oath at my US Senate hearing on early treatment of COVID. Another body blow to freedom of speech and expression. Very sad and scary. When does this end?”
As a sitting senator, Johnson’s stature may warrant a modicum more explanation than that afforded the average conservative kicked hastily off the platform without a word – so the managers of YouTube sent Senator Johnson’s channel a further message of elucidation:
“YouTube doesn’t allow claims that contradict local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19, to include guidance on treatment, prevention or transmission guidance.”
Just who those “local authorities” might be, the managers don’t say – because they don’t have to. There is no recourse for the exiled, and our cowardly social media authoritarians are allowed to cower behind Section 230, the federal law that recognizes them as private entities immune from liability – like bank robbers holding up a baby as a shield in a gunfight.
Many have conjectured the banished videos featured testimony about COVID treatments, including ivermectin, vitamin D, and hydroxychloroquine. Ivermectin has been touted as a COVID silver bullet by many doctors, who point to its excellent safety profile and its successful history of treating tropical diseases. It is FDA approved as an anti-parasitic drug – but not as a treatment for COVID. Many doctors swear by its efficacy against the coronavirus, as do their patients who have recovered. But discussions of its agency in fighting SARS CoV-2 are apparently a bridge too far for Google, which – after all – has apparently prioritized your health concerns beyond even those of monetizing its website.
Vitamin D deficiency has been strongly associated with a higher risk for coronavirus mortality. The number of doctors worldwide who recommend a low dose of 5,000 milligrams daily as prophylaxis against COVID-19 has steadily increased over the last year. A Spanish study conducted in September of 2020 offered robust evidence of significant reductions in severe distress and mortality based on daily vitamin D use. Just one of 50 patients given the vitamin required ICU admission while fully half of the patients denied it were placed in intensive care – and two of them died.
And of course, the weird and woeful tale of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the most politicized drug in history, is a case study in the power of propaganda and the corruption of our “expert” class. Anthony Fauci knows how powerful a weapon HCQ is because a study conducted at the NIH while he was head of NAIAD in 2005 proved that chloroquine was a “potent inhibitor” of a much deadlier coronavirus: SARS CoV. What did Anthony Fauci know, and when did he know it? He likely knows it all – and he knew it 15 years ago.
Some version of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko’s protocol, which recommends a low dose of HCQ combined with zinc and azithromycin, has been used throughout the world to stunningly efficacious effect in combatting COVID. Approximately 84% fewer hospitalizations and deaths were reported when using this safe, inexpensive malaria drug. Zelenko estimates a quarter of a million Americans didn’t have to die if HCQ had been adopted as a treatment early in the pandemic. Countries across the globe, including Greece, Russia, India, and Cuba, which had widespread early HCQ use, saw an astonishing 69% fewer deaths per million than countries such as France, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The American Journal of Medicine recently printed yet another peer-reviewed study demonstrating the impressive efficacy of HCQ against COVID, but when confronted about it, took pains to make clear the Journal itself wasn’t recommending use of the drug but had only agreed to publish the study. This is essentially the medical journal version of a hostage video.
And the intrepid AMA (American Medical Association) quietly rescinded its previous position against the prescription of HCQ to fight COVID. How and when did the AMA issue its whisper of a reversal? On page 18 of an internal document, just days before the election, after President Trump had been touting its potential since May.
But it is these facts and these stories, as told by brave medical doctors under oath in front of Congress, that the non-medical professionals and un-scientists of YouTube saw fit for erasure. As Senator Johnson asserted:
“Apparently, the ‘doctors’ at Google know more about practicing medicine than heroic doctors who have the courage and compassion to actually treat COVID patients and save lives.”
How naïve of the senator.
If the then most powerful man in the world – former President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump – can be silenced by social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, what hope have mere doctors of not being censored? What hope have the rest of us?
Censorship is the new lash of the Left. Truth is a mirage, shimmering in the distance, impossible to discern. It is a zeitgeist casualty. Truth has been supplanted by fear – and fear is control.
The narrative is all.
It calls to mind the single, prescient word commanding adherence, memorialized on street art of the late Andre the Giant throughout the world since the 1990’s – as ubiquitous as the lies we are now fed like livestock …
OBEY.
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