Tag: censorship

More Scientists Demand Lab Leak Investigation; Claim They Were Ostracised For Presenting Research Backing The Scenario

More prominent scientific figures have thrown their weight behind calls for investigating the lab leak theory as the cause of the coronavirus pandemic, with some revealing they were previously ostracised for presenting research that suggested the scenario was realistic.

The Daily Mail reports that British vaccine researcher and professor of oncology Angus Dalgleish struggled to find a publisher for his paper suggesting the virus’s spike protein contains artificially inserted sequences.

The report notes that the professor “said the research was shunned by the scientific community, who did not want to threaten China or be seen to be agreeing with President Donald Trump — who was a big advocate for the theory the virus was leaked from a lab at the time.”

Dalgleish noted in an interview with the Times of London (paywall) that his research has led him to believe that “The changes [in the bat coronavirus] required to infect humans are extremely unlikely to have occurred naturally.”

“I was basically ostracised. I was fearful — really frightened by the way I was being treated. I was told I was not an expert on coronaviruses and I should just shut up,” the professor claimed.

He added that he and his research team “couldn’t believe people with whom we’d collaborated and published papers with in the past would shun us — I was warned I was out of my depth and I shouldn’t get into this and I’d make a fool of myself.”

In addition, yet more scientific figures have demanded that the lab leak theory be investigated, with professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge Ravi Gupta noting that the scenario has not been ‘adequately explored’.

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Facebook to “fact-check” and suppress individual users

Personal Facebook accounts that are flagged by Facebook’s fact-checkers for repeatedly sharing “misinformation” will now have all their posts suppressed in the news feed as part of the tech giant’s latest crackdown on content that challenges the narratives of its fact-checking partners.

Facebook also announced that it will start dissuading its users from liking pages that are flagged by its fact-checkers via a pop-up that forces users to complete an additional step before they can like the page. When users attempt to like flagged pages, this pop up appears, tells users that the page has “repeatedly shared false information,” and asks them to choose whether to “Go Back” or “Follow Page Anyway.”

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Facebook no longer treating ‘man-made’ Covid as a crackpot idea

Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday, a move that acknowledges the renewed debate about the virus’ origins.

A narrative in flux: Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19 after the Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in late 2019 with symptoms consistent with the virus. The findings have reinvigorated the debate about the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory.

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USA Today censors high school girl’s essay about biological males taking over her sport

Chelsea Mitchell was a high school track athlete in Connecticut. Her scholastic track career was cut short when two biological males who identify as transgender joined women’s high school athletic competitions and literally ran away with all the top medals and accolades.

Mitchell wrote about her experience for USA Today in an opinion column, using the language that best described that experience, and using the word “male” to describe the biologically male athletes who identify as transgender. After the article was published, USA Today scrubbed Mitchell’s words, replacing the word “male” with “transgender.”

This completely belied Mitchell’s intention. Mitchell wrote about being crouched and ready to race on the starting line, “ranked fasted high school female in the 55-meter dash in the state,” and knowing she should feel confident.

“Instead,” she wrote, “all I can think about is how all my training, everything I’ve done to maximize my performance, might not be enough, simply because there’s a runner on the line with an enormous advantage: a male body.”

USA Today updated that to read “transgender runner,” citing as they did so that “This column has been updated to reflect USA TODAY’s standards and style guidelines.” They add further insult to Mitchell and her testimony by saying “We regret that hurtful language was used.”

They made these changes throughout Mitchell’s column. Mitchell knew that she was running against an athlete with a male body and all the advantages that this person’s male body brought with it in terms of raw strength, muscle mass, and bone density.

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CENSORED: National Vaccine Information Center

A highly-rated nonprofit vaccine safety charity has been censored by Facebook on behalf of pharmaceutical industry interests in a purge of vaccine safety information.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) had maintained a Facebook page since 2008.

The organization was started 39-years ago. Co-founder and president is Barbara Loe Fisher. Fisher became a vaccine safety advocate after her two-and-a-half-year-old son suffered a severe neurological reaction to DPT vaccine in 1980. He was left with multiple learning disabilities that required him to remain in a special education classroom throughout his public school education.

Far from a fringe group, as propagandists try to convince the public, Fisher has provided consumers with crucial vaccine safety information for decades and served as an appointed member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee as part of the Vaccine Safety Writing Group, on the agency’s Vaccine Policy Analysis Collaborative, on the Blue Ribbon Panel on Vaccine Safety, and Chair of the Subcommittee on Vaccine Adverse Events.

Additionally, Fisher has served as a member of the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. And she has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Forum.

We are not surprised that Mark Zuckerberg views the truthful information that NVIC publishes about vaccine science, policy and law as a threat to perpetuating false narratives about vaccine safety created by the pharmaceutical industry and its business partners. The U.S Congress has encouraged the creation of public-private business partnerships between vaccine manufacturers and federal agencies for the past three decades. In order to be part of those lucrative partnerships, Silicon Valley companies like Facebook are clearly happy to engage in censorship. If NVIC had not done such a good job educating the public about vaccination and health for four decades, our Facebook page would still be up.

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Facebook Whistleblowers Reveal Campaign To Censor Vaccine Hesitancy

Whistleblower organization Project Veritas has obtained internal documents from Facebook insiders detailing the company’s efforts to censor concerns over the COVID-19 vaccine.

Leaked company documents provided by two whistleblowers detail Facebook’s plan to combat “vaccine hesitancy” (VH) worldwide via “comment demotion”.

“They’re trying to control this content before it even makes it onto your page before you even see it,” one insider told Project Veritas. “If I lose my job, it’s like, what do I do? But that’s less of a concern to me.”

The social media giant’s goal is to “reduce user exposure” to those with VH, while also reducing the ability to engage with said posts.

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Doctor’s message about low pediatric deaths from COVID blocked by Facebook

Facebook removed a comment by a doctor on the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths. Facebook claimed the comment violated it “Community Standards on Spam.”

A Facebook user asked about the number of COVID-19 pediatric deaths in the month of April. Dr. Tracy Høeg, a sports, spine, and regenerative medicine doctor, responded with factual information from the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and even included a graph.

“Part of the reason I have (for the most part) left Facebook is they delete my post/responses that are factual, which I triple check,” Dr. Tracy Høeg wrote in a May 20 Facebook post. “I was responding to a question about what the number of pediatric deaths were due to COVID in April. I don’t feel like directly citing numbers from CDC and AAP should be deleted as spam, but maybe that is just me. I have moved to Twitter FYI.”

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How Facebook uses ‘fact-checking’ to suppress scientific truth

At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high-school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events.

But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?

One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social-media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social-media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.

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