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As of Wednesday, 13th October 2021, my Twitter account (@davidjthunder), which had 25,000 followers, has been permanently suspended, for reasons that are frankly baffling to me. I have taken a sceptical, non-mainstream position on a number of important public health matters in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, but I cannot understand how my arguments could reasonably be construed as purveying the sort of “misleading information” about Covid-19 that could justify terminating my account.
I am not a scientist, but I am a qualified and experienced political philosopher (www.davidthunder.com/bio.html) who brings my analytic tools and philosophical training to the task of interpreting available facts and evidence about the pandemic, drawing heavily on the expertise and knowledge of respected scientists and analysts. The positions I have argued for, while opposed by many Western government health agencies, are supported by prominent experts with impeccable credentials, including widely published physicians, and researchers of medicine and epidemiology at world-class universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford Universities.
Some General Considerations on Twitter's Censorship Policies
Before delving into the misinformation accusations Twitter has levelled at me, it is important to step back and note that the essence of modern science is contestation, debate, and exchange of conflicting arguments, so that pockets of consensus are gradually formed as one or another argument begins to win out. The science surrounding the pandemic touches on very complex and thorny matters such as the dynamics of disease transmission, the ethical acceptability of different risk-benefit tradeoffs, the efficacy of emerging Covid treatments, and the moral appropriateness of highly intrusive and coercive political interventions. These are all matters upon which one should expect scientists, politicians, and citizens to disagree.
In this context, Twitter, as a private company that controls a large part of the public sphere, has a special responsibility to allow scientific, moral, and political debate to unfold on its own terms, and not to pre-emptively enforce an orthodoxy that wilfully ignores significant areas of clinical practice and pretends that a large bulk of the scientific literature it disagrees with does not exist.
If Twitter suppresses viewpoints and information based on its own reasonably contestable political, ideological, or scientific position, or treats one school of thought as automatically self-validating or above question, it transforms its platform into an enemy of science and an instrument of partisan propaganda. When Twitter becomes the guardian of a partisan ideology or narrow scientific orthodoxy, it places its own platform at loggerheads with the purpose of the public sphere, which is to permit citizens, scholars, scientists, and public officials to put relevant evidence and arguments from different sources to the test until the best argument wins out.
The Twitter “rule” which has been consistently invoked to justify the censorship of my tweets and those of many others, is a rule against “misleading and/or potentially dangerous information” related to Covid-19. This sort of rule sounds reasonable on its face, but in practice, it is open to serious abuse, depending how it is interpreted and applied.
The category of "misleading and/or dangerous information" is a can of worms in its own right (as I explain in this article) because it is very, very difficult to interpret it in a way that is not highly selective, tendentious and question-begging (those I disagree with are guilty of misinformation, not those who support my preferred narrative), or in a way that does not give an unfair advantage to the opinions of one side of the debate ("you are not just in disagreement with me: you are propagating "misinformation."").
But allowing that the rule against "misleading information" on Covid-19 does exist within the universe of Twitter, it is open to a wide range of interpretations, some more favourable to freedom of discussion, and others more favourable to despotic levels of control over discussion.
On a more or less ecumenical reading that could favour some substantial amount of open discussion, it means that someone propagating manifest falsehoods, of the sort that any reasonable and impartial person surveying the evidence would immediately recognize, or views that would obviously put people’s health or life at risk, should be censored.
For example, if someone suggested that everyone, without exception, should take a very high dose of Ivermectin to prevent the contraction of Covid-19, such a view has virtually no clinical or theoretical support, and may well put people’s lives or health in danger. So this view could be censored, based on a more or less non-partisan reading of “misleading and/or potentially dangerous information.”
On an ideologically partisan reading, on the other hand, “misleading and/or potentially dangerous information” would be whatever is deemed to be so by official authorities and experts cherry-picked by Twitter, such as the World Health Organisation or some national health authorities. This ideologically partisan interpretation, which seems to be the one Twitter favours, is entirely arbitrary, because it assumes that certain official authorities, just because of their position in society, are naturally superior interpreters of evidence and facts than other qualified experts who happen not to be nominated to positions of power within these particular institutions.
But there is absolutely no reason to assume that a medical expert nominated to the World Health Organisation is more likely to purvey true and safe information than a professor of medicine at Harvard or Stanford medical school. Science does not work like that, nor does any field of knowledge. So if “misleading and/or potentially dangerous information” is construed in a partisan manner, as any claim that contradicts a handful of cherry-picked expert authorities, then it represents a highly arbitrary ideological preference for one source of information over another, in the context of unsettled scientific and moral questions.
Twitter's tendency to adopt a highly partisan version of its rule against "misleading and/or dangerous information" is aggravated by its consistent refusal to give any specific reasons for sanctioning tweets.
Typically, when sanctioning someone or denying an appeal, Twitter cites some highly general "rule" such as a rule against "misleading Covid-19 information," without specifying which aspect of the tweet violated the rule, and why. Framing a proper defence or appeal is next to impossible, since the charge is hopelessly vague and un-specified. How does one engage with an umpire who just accuses one of "Covid misinformation" without actually explaining what exactly one said that was false or misleading, or which "truth" was being transgressed?
Given the vague, "catch-all" character of the reasons Twitter gives to justify account locks and suspensions, and the consistent refusal of Twitter to offer any further details by way of explanation, it all begins to look very much like a "show trial" with a judge sitting in Twitter who penalises people for saying things he or she doesn't like to hear.
And now, for the “nitty-gritty”…
The declared basis for Twitter’s decision to suspend my @davidjthunder account is “repeat violations” of Twitter rules. The tweet that sparked the suspension was the following:
“(Ivermectin:) A very safe drug that has been widely used in India, Mexico and elsewhere to cure or alleviate Covid-19; its use is being actively discouraged by regulators while an experimental vaccine with a far worse safety profile is being actively promoted for the general population.”
This Tweet was tagged for “violating our Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy.”
I immediately appealed this suspension as I could see nothing inherently “misleading” about the tweet in question, and certainly nothing of the sort that could justify an account suspension. I received a swift and definitive reply by the next day:
“Your account was permanently suspended due to multiple or repeat violations of the Twitter Rules… This account will not be restored. This case will now be closed and replies will not be monitored.”
My account had been locked by Twitter on three previous occasions, so I retrieved the offending tweets to see what these “repeat violations” actually amounted to. Below, I will list each of the four tweets leading to account suspension, one by one, and explain its evidential basis.
Some readers, and presumably some people working in Twitter, may not agree with every claim made in these tweets. But robust disagreement is part and parcel of any public debate, especially on complex matters, so the mere fact of disagreement cannot justify censorship. I believe it would be unreasonable for anyone, surveying the rational basis for these tweets, to conclude that they constitute the type of “misleading information” that merits censorship. They may be controversial, as many, many Twitter claims are, but that certainly does not make them insidious, intrinsically misleading, or dangerous to public health.
Let’s take a closer look…
TWEET 1. “(Ivermectin:) A very safe drug that has been widely used in India, Mexico and elsewhere to cure or alleviate Covid-19; its use is being actively discouraged by regulators while an experimental vaccine with a far worse safety profile is being actively promoted for the general population.”
This Tweet was tagged for “violating our Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy.”
Is Ivermectin “very safe”?
Absolutely. It has been used for over 20 years by millions of people and is on the WHO’s list of “essential medicines.”
Has Ivermectin been used to cure or alleviate Covid-19 in Mexico, Indian and elsewhere?
Unquestionably. Why else would it be used on Covid patients, if not in order to "cure or alleviate" their symptoms? In Mexico, a large study found a dramatic improvement in hospitalisation rates for patients who tested positive for Covid-19 and were given an Ivermectin treatment kit early on, compared with the group of similar age and health characteristics that were not.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/r93g4/
Many doctors have come forward in defence of the efficacy of Ivermectin against Covid-19 (see, for example, Dr Pierre Kory’s sworn testimony to the US Senate). According to an analysis of existing clinical trials published in the American Journal of Therapeutics,
"Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”
This study has subsequently been criticised because some of its data was later shown to be defective. One of the co-authors, Dr Tess Lawrie, ran the numbers excluding that data, and still came up with results showing the conclusions drawn by the article were robust, as she explains here, where she also critiques other public evidence being brought against the efficacy of Ivermectin, such as the Cochrane study finding against the efficacy of Ivermectin.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34145166/
An alliance of front-line doctors, called the “Frontline Critical Care Alliance,” has a website in which they present their perspective on the benefits of Ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19, informed by available research and clinical experience. They point out that "we now have nearly 7,000 patients and 24 controlled trials of ivermectin in varying sizes and designs and countries, with nearly all resulting in consistent, reproducible, large magnitude, statistically significant findings of efficacy as a prophylactic and in early and late phase disease."
https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/faq-on-ivermectin/
The point is, Ivermectin has, indisputably, been used widely by physicians in treatment plans for Covid-19, and has been supported by at least some public health agencies, most notably in India; furthermore, there is plenty of clinical testimony and a large number of significant clinical trials pointing to the efficacy of Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19.
Consequently, to say, as I have said in the tweet above, that Ivermectin has been widely used "to cure or alleviate Covid-19" is certainly a reasonable interpretation of the available evidence. I have not stated in this tweet with what degree of success, or what percentage of patients benefit from this drug. It can reasonably be inferred from the tweet that I believe it has some success, a view that is shared by a significant number of frontline doctors and at least some widely published physicians.
Even if Twitter believes Ivermectin is not effective, there is enough scientific evidence and testimony out there by now in favour of its efficacy that a tweet implying it is probably effective in many cases, at least in alleviating the symptoms of Covid-19, represents the views of a significant significant section of the scientific and medical community, not a "dangerous," inherently "misleading," or outlandish opinion worthy of censorship.
Do the Covid vaccines have a “far worse safety profile” than Ivermectin?
All we have to do is compare vaccine adverse event records with Ivermectin adverse event records to realise that Ivermectin is much safer. According to data retrieved by Dr Tess Lawrie (director of The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd) from WHO/Uppsala VigiAccess pharmacovigilance database (22.03.2021), and reported in her written evidence submitted to a UK parliamentary committee, the average reported deaths per year associated with Ivermectin since 1992 have been less than 1, while the average reported deaths per year associated with Covid vaccines (as of 22nd March 2021) have been 9,612. Similarly, the reported adverse events per year associated with Ivermectin have been 4,702, while those associated with Covid vaccines (on average, per year) have been 309,403. So by any stretch of the imagination, the safety profile of Ivermectin is far superior to that of the Covid vaccines.
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/36858/pdf/
TWEET 2: “We’re not going to get to herd immunity as a country if children are not vaccinated…” - Words of a mother, no doubt well-intentioned but nonsensical. Children are at negligible risk from Covid. Exposing them to an experimental vaccine is irresponsible.”
Are children at negligible risk from Covid?
Without a shadow of a doubt. According to one major study of public health data in England, children are at “extremely low risk of death or hospitalisation” from Covid-19. Up to February 2021, a total of 25 children had died in England of Covid. This study was not peer-reviewed but it is corroborated by many other expert analyses.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/covid-children-hospital-death-rates-b1880583.html
Is it irresponsible to expose children to an experimental vaccine?
Assuming that the protective effects of the vaccine are negligible, and given that the risks for children are still not well understood, and given that the UK’s Join Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation found that the risk-benefit ratio did not favour vaccinating healthy children under 18, it seems irresponsible to expose children indiscriminately to the risks of an experimental vaccine (i.e. a vaccine still under trial). Supposing Twitter disagrees with this assessment, corroborated by the expert recommendations of the JCVI? Does that give them a right to censor it?
TWEET 3: “It is silly to equate a young person’s refusal of the vaccine as a belief in their ‘invincibility’. Do people actually believe that a 19 year old (I assume without an underlying health issue) is at greater risk from Covid than a novel vaccine approved for emergency use only?”
This rhetorical question suggests that the risk-benefit analysis for a healthy young adult may not justify taking a vaccine that is still under trial, a vaccine with long-term risks that are not yet well understood, given that the risk of contracting serious disease from Covid for someone in this category is very, very low. This risk-benefit assessment may be contested by some medical experts, but many eminent doctors share it, and it is a reasonable interpretation of the data, which show very few serious illnesses or deaths from Covid-19 in young and healthy adults. Just because Twitter does not share that assessment, this does not give them the right to censor it.
TWEET 4: “Covid vaccines do NOT stop Covid transmission. Many people, especially children and young adults, do not need to vaccinate as their natural immune systems can protect them. So vaccine passes only serve as a form of vax coercion and population control, not disease control.”
Is it true that Covid vaccines do not stop Covid transmission?
Indisputably so. Many studies, including studies based on official Israeli data, show that a significant number of vaccinated individuals do get infected and sick with Covid-19, even if they are protected from severe disease. So this vaccine clearly does not confer sterilising immunity: it allows for transmission. Furthermore, the degree of protection against infection falls over time, as recent studies have shown. Here’s a link to one such study:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1
Is is true that many people do not need to vaccinate because their natural immune systems can protect them?
Without a doubt. Large studies of reinfection rates coming out of Israel show that those who have developed natural immunity through exposure to Covid-19 have much lower rates of reinfection than those with only vaccine-based immunity. So “many” people, in particular those who have had Covid-19 already, have more immunity than the vaccinated and therefore do not NEED the vaccine. It is also true that healthy young adults almost always experience mild symptoms from Covid-19 that pass relatively quickly. So MANY people ARE already protected by natural immunity. This is a solid inference from the available evidence, not a wild hypothesis.
https://theconversation.com/covid-infections-may-give-more-potent-immunity-than-vaccines-but-that-doesnt-mean-you-should-try-to-catch-it-167122
Given that vaccines do not stop transmission, does it follow that vaccine passes are just about "vax coercion and population control"?
Assuming that vaccines do not stop transmission, the medical rationale for vax passes, that they somehow create protected, "Covid-free" zones, is severely undermined, if not eviscerated. So the claim that vaccine passes, under these circumstances, primarily serve as a method for coercing people into compliance, is hardly implausible or completely far-fetched, even if it may be contested by some people. The problem is, Twitter now takes reasonably contestable statements and political commentary, that could be debated, and treats them as “misinformation” or as “potentially dangerous” just because Twitter takes a different position on the matter.
To sum up, it is very hard to see how Twitter can reasonably allege that the four tweets above constitute “misleading information,” unless they are equating “misleading information” with information that happens to contradict some expert sources that they cherry-pick, or is in conflict with their own political or ideological agenda.
On a less arbitrary and partisan construal of misinformation – say, information that contradicts well established and virtually uncontested scientific facts – it is patently obvious that the claims made in these four tweets have substantial support in the scientific community, and therefore do not constitute “misinformation.” Some of the claims made in these tweets are debatable, like many, many claims made on Twitter on a daily basis, but the notion that they involve “misinformation” or are “potentially dangerous” does not stand up to scrutiny.
If Twitter continues to suspend accounts in this manner, just because Twitter managers or bosses disagree with some people’s Tweets, they will be attacking one of the pillars of a free public sphere: the vibrant exchange of ideas between people who disagree on some issues.
Let me conclude by mentioning that MANY accounts on Twitter say things far more radical and absolute against current vaccination campaigns and in favour of Ivermectin and other drugs being used to treat Covid than anything I have said, yet they remain open. So it looks very much as if Twitter has decided to unfairly target my account for the most extreme sanction available to them: permanent suspension. I have no idea why, though I cannot help suspecting it is precisely because I am not a "crazy" who can easily be dismissed: I ground my claims in careful argumentation and a range of evidence, including observations about human nature and behaviour, evidence published in relevant peer-reviewed journals, publicly available data, and clinical practice as reported by leading physicians.
I am not a scientist, but I am a qualified and experienced political philosopher (www.davidthunder.com/bio.html) who brings my analytic tools and philosophical training to the task of interpreting available facts and evidence about the pandemic, drawing heavily on the expertise and knowledge of respected scientists and analysts. The positions I have argued for, while opposed by many Western government health agencies, are supported by prominent experts with impeccable credentials, including widely published physicians, and researchers of medicine and epidemiology at world-class universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford Universities.
Some General Considerations on Twitter's Censorship Policies
Before delving into the misinformation accusations Twitter has levelled at me, it is important to step back and note that the essence of modern science is contestation, debate, and exchange of conflicting arguments, so that pockets of consensus are gradually formed as one or another argument begins to win out. The science surrounding the pandemic touches on very complex and thorny matters such as the dynamics of disease transmission, the ethical acceptability of different risk-benefit tradeoffs, the efficacy of emerging Covid treatments, and the moral appropriateness of highly intrusive and coercive political interventions. These are all matters upon which one should expect scientists, politicians, and citizens to disagree.
In this context, Twitter, as a private company that controls a large part of the public sphere, has a special responsibility to allow scientific, moral, and political debate to unfold on its own terms, and not to pre-emptively enforce an orthodoxy that wilfully ignores significant areas of clinical practice and pretends that a large bulk of the scientific literature it disagrees with does not exist.
If Twitter suppresses viewpoints and information based on its own reasonably contestable political, ideological, or scientific position, or treats one school of thought as automatically self-validating or above question, it transforms its platform into an enemy of science and an instrument of partisan propaganda. When Twitter becomes the guardian of a partisan ideology or narrow scientific orthodoxy, it places its own platform at loggerheads with the purpose of the public sphere, which is to permit citizens, scholars, scientists, and public officials to put relevant evidence and arguments from different sources to the test until the best argument wins out.
The Twitter “rule” which has been consistently invoked to justify the censorship of my tweets and those of many others, is a rule against “misleading and/or potentially dangerous information” related to Covid-19. This sort of rule sounds reasonable on its face, but in practice, it is open to serious abuse, depending how it is interpreted and applied.
The category of "misleading and/or dangerous information" is a can of worms in its own right (as I explain in this article) because it is very, very difficult to interpret it in a way that is not highly selective, tendentious and question-begging (those I disagree with are guilty of misinformation, not those who support my preferred narrative), or in a way that does not give an unfair advantage to the opinions of one side of the debate ("you are not just in disagreement with me: you are propagating "misinformation."").
But allowing that the rule against "misleading information" on Covid-19 does exist within the universe of Twitter, it is open to a wide range of interpretations, some more favourable to freedom of discussion, and others more favourable to despotic levels of control over discussion.
On a more or less ecumenical reading that could favour some substantial amount of open discussion, it means that someone propagating manifest falsehoods, of the sort that any reasonable and impartial person surveying the evidence would immediately recognize, or views that would obviously put people’s health or life at risk, should be censored.
For example, if someone suggested that everyone, without exception, should take a very high dose of Ivermectin to prevent the contraction of Covid-19, such a view has virtually no clinical or theoretical support, and may well put people’s lives or health in danger. So this view could be censored, based on a more or less non-partisan reading of “misleading and/or potentially dangerous information.”
On an ideologically partisan reading, on the other hand, “misleading and/or potentially dangerous information” would be whatever is deemed to be so by official authorities and experts cherry-picked by Twitter, such as the World Health Organisation or some national health authorities. This ideologically partisan interpretation, which seems to be the one Twitter favours, is entirely arbitrary, because it assumes that certain official authorities, just because of their position in society, are naturally superior interpreters of evidence and facts than other qualified experts who happen not to be nominated to positions of power within these particular institutions.
But there is absolutely no reason to assume that a medical expert nominated to the World Health Organisation is more likely to purvey true and safe information than a professor of medicine at Harvard or Stanford medical school. Science does not work like that, nor does any field of knowledge. So if “misleading and/or potentially dangerous information” is construed in a partisan manner, as any claim that contradicts a handful of cherry-picked expert authorities, then it represents a highly arbitrary ideological preference for one source of information over another, in the context of unsettled scientific and moral questions.
Twitter's tendency to adopt a highly partisan version of its rule against "misleading and/or dangerous information" is aggravated by its consistent refusal to give any specific reasons for sanctioning tweets.
Typically, when sanctioning someone or denying an appeal, Twitter cites some highly general "rule" such as a rule against "misleading Covid-19 information," without specifying which aspect of the tweet violated the rule, and why. Framing a proper defence or appeal is next to impossible, since the charge is hopelessly vague and un-specified. How does one engage with an umpire who just accuses one of "Covid misinformation" without actually explaining what exactly one said that was false or misleading, or which "truth" was being transgressed?
Given the vague, "catch-all" character of the reasons Twitter gives to justify account locks and suspensions, and the consistent refusal of Twitter to offer any further details by way of explanation, it all begins to look very much like a "show trial" with a judge sitting in Twitter who penalises people for saying things he or she doesn't like to hear.
And now, for the “nitty-gritty”…
The declared basis for Twitter’s decision to suspend my @davidjthunder account is “repeat violations” of Twitter rules. The tweet that sparked the suspension was the following:
“(Ivermectin:) A very safe drug that has been widely used in India, Mexico and elsewhere to cure or alleviate Covid-19; its use is being actively discouraged by regulators while an experimental vaccine with a far worse safety profile is being actively promoted for the general population.”
This Tweet was tagged for “violating our Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy.”
I immediately appealed this suspension as I could see nothing inherently “misleading” about the tweet in question, and certainly nothing of the sort that could justify an account suspension. I received a swift and definitive reply by the next day:
“Your account was permanently suspended due to multiple or repeat violations of the Twitter Rules… This account will not be restored. This case will now be closed and replies will not be monitored.”
My account had been locked by Twitter on three previous occasions, so I retrieved the offending tweets to see what these “repeat violations” actually amounted to. Below, I will list each of the four tweets leading to account suspension, one by one, and explain its evidential basis.
Some readers, and presumably some people working in Twitter, may not agree with every claim made in these tweets. But robust disagreement is part and parcel of any public debate, especially on complex matters, so the mere fact of disagreement cannot justify censorship. I believe it would be unreasonable for anyone, surveying the rational basis for these tweets, to conclude that they constitute the type of “misleading information” that merits censorship. They may be controversial, as many, many Twitter claims are, but that certainly does not make them insidious, intrinsically misleading, or dangerous to public health.
Let’s take a closer look…
TWEET 1. “(Ivermectin:) A very safe drug that has been widely used in India, Mexico and elsewhere to cure or alleviate Covid-19; its use is being actively discouraged by regulators while an experimental vaccine with a far worse safety profile is being actively promoted for the general population.”
This Tweet was tagged for “violating our Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy.”
Is Ivermectin “very safe”?
Absolutely. It has been used for over 20 years by millions of people and is on the WHO’s list of “essential medicines.”
Has Ivermectin been used to cure or alleviate Covid-19 in Mexico, Indian and elsewhere?
Unquestionably. Why else would it be used on Covid patients, if not in order to "cure or alleviate" their symptoms? In Mexico, a large study found a dramatic improvement in hospitalisation rates for patients who tested positive for Covid-19 and were given an Ivermectin treatment kit early on, compared with the group of similar age and health characteristics that were not.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/r93g4/
Many doctors have come forward in defence of the efficacy of Ivermectin against Covid-19 (see, for example, Dr Pierre Kory’s sworn testimony to the US Senate). According to an analysis of existing clinical trials published in the American Journal of Therapeutics,
"Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”
This study has subsequently been criticised because some of its data was later shown to be defective. One of the co-authors, Dr Tess Lawrie, ran the numbers excluding that data, and still came up with results showing the conclusions drawn by the article were robust, as she explains here, where she also critiques other public evidence being brought against the efficacy of Ivermectin, such as the Cochrane study finding against the efficacy of Ivermectin.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34145166/
An alliance of front-line doctors, called the “Frontline Critical Care Alliance,” has a website in which they present their perspective on the benefits of Ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19, informed by available research and clinical experience. They point out that "we now have nearly 7,000 patients and 24 controlled trials of ivermectin in varying sizes and designs and countries, with nearly all resulting in consistent, reproducible, large magnitude, statistically significant findings of efficacy as a prophylactic and in early and late phase disease."
https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/faq-on-ivermectin/
The point is, Ivermectin has, indisputably, been used widely by physicians in treatment plans for Covid-19, and has been supported by at least some public health agencies, most notably in India; furthermore, there is plenty of clinical testimony and a large number of significant clinical trials pointing to the efficacy of Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19.
Consequently, to say, as I have said in the tweet above, that Ivermectin has been widely used "to cure or alleviate Covid-19" is certainly a reasonable interpretation of the available evidence. I have not stated in this tweet with what degree of success, or what percentage of patients benefit from this drug. It can reasonably be inferred from the tweet that I believe it has some success, a view that is shared by a significant number of frontline doctors and at least some widely published physicians.
Even if Twitter believes Ivermectin is not effective, there is enough scientific evidence and testimony out there by now in favour of its efficacy that a tweet implying it is probably effective in many cases, at least in alleviating the symptoms of Covid-19, represents the views of a significant significant section of the scientific and medical community, not a "dangerous," inherently "misleading," or outlandish opinion worthy of censorship.
Do the Covid vaccines have a “far worse safety profile” than Ivermectin?
All we have to do is compare vaccine adverse event records with Ivermectin adverse event records to realise that Ivermectin is much safer. According to data retrieved by Dr Tess Lawrie (director of The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd) from WHO/Uppsala VigiAccess pharmacovigilance database (22.03.2021), and reported in her written evidence submitted to a UK parliamentary committee, the average reported deaths per year associated with Ivermectin since 1992 have been less than 1, while the average reported deaths per year associated with Covid vaccines (as of 22nd March 2021) have been 9,612. Similarly, the reported adverse events per year associated with Ivermectin have been 4,702, while those associated with Covid vaccines (on average, per year) have been 309,403. So by any stretch of the imagination, the safety profile of Ivermectin is far superior to that of the Covid vaccines.
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/36858/pdf/
TWEET 2: “We’re not going to get to herd immunity as a country if children are not vaccinated…” - Words of a mother, no doubt well-intentioned but nonsensical. Children are at negligible risk from Covid. Exposing them to an experimental vaccine is irresponsible.”
Are children at negligible risk from Covid?
Without a shadow of a doubt. According to one major study of public health data in England, children are at “extremely low risk of death or hospitalisation” from Covid-19. Up to February 2021, a total of 25 children had died in England of Covid. This study was not peer-reviewed but it is corroborated by many other expert analyses.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/covid-children-hospital-death-rates-b1880583.html
Is it irresponsible to expose children to an experimental vaccine?
Assuming that the protective effects of the vaccine are negligible, and given that the risks for children are still not well understood, and given that the UK’s Join Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation found that the risk-benefit ratio did not favour vaccinating healthy children under 18, it seems irresponsible to expose children indiscriminately to the risks of an experimental vaccine (i.e. a vaccine still under trial). Supposing Twitter disagrees with this assessment, corroborated by the expert recommendations of the JCVI? Does that give them a right to censor it?
TWEET 3: “It is silly to equate a young person’s refusal of the vaccine as a belief in their ‘invincibility’. Do people actually believe that a 19 year old (I assume without an underlying health issue) is at greater risk from Covid than a novel vaccine approved for emergency use only?”
This rhetorical question suggests that the risk-benefit analysis for a healthy young adult may not justify taking a vaccine that is still under trial, a vaccine with long-term risks that are not yet well understood, given that the risk of contracting serious disease from Covid for someone in this category is very, very low. This risk-benefit assessment may be contested by some medical experts, but many eminent doctors share it, and it is a reasonable interpretation of the data, which show very few serious illnesses or deaths from Covid-19 in young and healthy adults. Just because Twitter does not share that assessment, this does not give them the right to censor it.
TWEET 4: “Covid vaccines do NOT stop Covid transmission. Many people, especially children and young adults, do not need to vaccinate as their natural immune systems can protect them. So vaccine passes only serve as a form of vax coercion and population control, not disease control.”
Is it true that Covid vaccines do not stop Covid transmission?
Indisputably so. Many studies, including studies based on official Israeli data, show that a significant number of vaccinated individuals do get infected and sick with Covid-19, even if they are protected from severe disease. So this vaccine clearly does not confer sterilising immunity: it allows for transmission. Furthermore, the degree of protection against infection falls over time, as recent studies have shown. Here’s a link to one such study:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1
Is is true that many people do not need to vaccinate because their natural immune systems can protect them?
Without a doubt. Large studies of reinfection rates coming out of Israel show that those who have developed natural immunity through exposure to Covid-19 have much lower rates of reinfection than those with only vaccine-based immunity. So “many” people, in particular those who have had Covid-19 already, have more immunity than the vaccinated and therefore do not NEED the vaccine. It is also true that healthy young adults almost always experience mild symptoms from Covid-19 that pass relatively quickly. So MANY people ARE already protected by natural immunity. This is a solid inference from the available evidence, not a wild hypothesis.
https://theconversation.com/covid-infections-may-give-more-potent-immunity-than-vaccines-but-that-doesnt-mean-you-should-try-to-catch-it-167122
Given that vaccines do not stop transmission, does it follow that vaccine passes are just about "vax coercion and population control"?
Assuming that vaccines do not stop transmission, the medical rationale for vax passes, that they somehow create protected, "Covid-free" zones, is severely undermined, if not eviscerated. So the claim that vaccine passes, under these circumstances, primarily serve as a method for coercing people into compliance, is hardly implausible or completely far-fetched, even if it may be contested by some people. The problem is, Twitter now takes reasonably contestable statements and political commentary, that could be debated, and treats them as “misinformation” or as “potentially dangerous” just because Twitter takes a different position on the matter.
To sum up, it is very hard to see how Twitter can reasonably allege that the four tweets above constitute “misleading information,” unless they are equating “misleading information” with information that happens to contradict some expert sources that they cherry-pick, or is in conflict with their own political or ideological agenda.
On a less arbitrary and partisan construal of misinformation – say, information that contradicts well established and virtually uncontested scientific facts – it is patently obvious that the claims made in these four tweets have substantial support in the scientific community, and therefore do not constitute “misinformation.” Some of the claims made in these tweets are debatable, like many, many claims made on Twitter on a daily basis, but the notion that they involve “misinformation” or are “potentially dangerous” does not stand up to scrutiny.
If Twitter continues to suspend accounts in this manner, just because Twitter managers or bosses disagree with some people’s Tweets, they will be attacking one of the pillars of a free public sphere: the vibrant exchange of ideas between people who disagree on some issues.
Let me conclude by mentioning that MANY accounts on Twitter say things far more radical and absolute against current vaccination campaigns and in favour of Ivermectin and other drugs being used to treat Covid than anything I have said, yet they remain open. So it looks very much as if Twitter has decided to unfairly target my account for the most extreme sanction available to them: permanent suspension. I have no idea why, though I cannot help suspecting it is precisely because I am not a "crazy" who can easily be dismissed: I ground my claims in careful argumentation and a range of evidence, including observations about human nature and behaviour, evidence published in relevant peer-reviewed journals, publicly available data, and clinical practice as reported by leading physicians.
