Portland-based evolutionary biologists Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying are the liberal-left hosts of the podcast DarkHorse. A few months back the podcast examined the scientific debate on the safety and efficacy of the drug Ivermectin for COVID-19, with ICU doctor Pierre Kory. The episode ran afoul of YouTube’s “COVID-19 medical misinformation policy,” which specifically bars against “claims that Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for COVID-19.”
Youtube yanked the episode in short order. In all, DarkHorse has been flagged 11 times for violations.
A June 11 episode of DarkHorse hosted a three-hour discussion with Steve Kirsh, the founder and executive director of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund (CETF), and Dr. Robert Malone, a former Salk Institute researcher and one of the scientists commonly credited for inventing the mRNA gene therapy that Pfizer and Moderna have adapted for their COVID-19 vaccines.
The discussion ventured again into Ivermectin territory, before Weinstein and his guests explored the “there be dragons” part of the map labelled vaccine safety. YouTube vapourized the podcast within a few weeks.
In this last offending episode, Dr. Malone discussed the potential risks of COVID-19 gene therapy injections, and endorsed the findings of Guelph University viral immunologist Dr. Bryam Bridle. The latter and his colleagues presented an FOI request to the Japanese government to access a biodistribution study indicating that COVID vaccine nanoparticles travel throughout the body, rather than stay safely in the shoulder injection site.
Malone, who travels inside the regulatory circles that approve pharmaceutical drugs, said he alerted the FDA to the potential health risks from spike proteins expressed throughout the body, apparently to no avail. (For a good rundown of the entire debacle and YouTube’s efforts to demonetize DarkHorse, check out Matt Taibbi’s report here. )
Malone is no “antivaxxer” - he says he’s taken two Moderna COVID-19 shots so he could continue to travel freely as a working scientist. But he’s of the opinion that the risks from the injections outweigh the benefits for the young, and that that those who have recovered from COVID-19 should not receive them.
Here’s where things started to get hairy.
Demonize, demonitize
It wasn’t just YouTube that had a problem with this episode. Within days of his DarkHorse appearance, Malone’s scientific accomplishments and contributions were scrubbed from Wikipedia. LinkedIn also deleted his academic profile from their site.
This isn’t without precedent. Harvard professor Martin Kuldorff, a widely-cited epidemiologist and infectious disease expert, ran afoul of the social media star chamber last March after posting a tweet advising that young people do not and should not require a COVID injection. Twitter slapped a warning label on his post, and users were prevented from liking or retweeting the post.
What’s astonishing is how little it now takes for the social media giants to flag a scientist, their credentials be damned. As noted in this report here, “Dr. Kulldorff serves on the Covid-19 vaccine safety subgroup that the CDC, NIH, and FDA rely upon for technical expertise on this very subject.”
Satoshi Ōmura won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work on Ivermectin, but that didn’t deter YouTube from reportedly deleting a video by him.
These and other instances of deplatforming, demonetizing and censoring of respectable scientific figures aren’t likely all the result of Algorithms Gone Wild - bots scraping content for offending keywords. In particular, LinkedIn’s removal of Dr. Malone’s profile seemed to be the result of a decision, both conscious and Kafkaesque, by some unidentified figure within the organization - with no court of final appeal. (Weinstein told Matt Taibbi he was never able to determine who was responsible for YouTube’s decisions on his podcast.)
This isn’t entirely a corporate matter. US congress has been petitioning the big tech monopolies to police the Internet more rigorously for “misinformation,” a word that now apparently subsumes anything that departs from the officially accepted media narrative on Sars-Cov-2, social distancing measures, mRNA vaccines, and the safety and efficacy of possible supplementary treatments like Ivermectin - even if the claimant is an accredited scientist or academic.
Again, we’re not just talking about the censoring of scientific opinion on the Internet, we are talking about the actual deletion of information on the sources, prominent figures like Malone. If this continues, anyone will be able to rightly claim there’s no real academic controversy or alternative views on these matters, without realizing why: the bios of the contrarians and their claims have been effectively memory-holed.
Since when should Google, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook be the arbiters of what’s scientifically credible and what isn’t? That’s an observation so banal I shouldn’t even have to make it.
This historical revisionism brings to mind the Soviet Union of the last century, when high-level officials who fell out of favour with the Politburo were airbrushed out of photographs to make it appear they never existed in the first place. Here’s a 1937 before-and-after shot of Joseph Stalin with Nikola Yezhov, the head of the secret police:
I don’t believe an increasingly lockstep relationship between the social media giants and government agencies - which has accelerated under the Biden administration - has anything to do with the spectre of domestic socialism or communism, in spite of any QAnonish claims to the contrary. It seems to me the cyber-stifling of scientists is a signature of increasing “corporatism,” commonly understood as the merger of state and corporate power. Totalitarian, regardless.
Biden’s predecessor presented no real barrier to corporatism, which was underway long before Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. Through the interlocking interests of hedge funds, banks, media, Silcon Valley, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, corporatism is now taking the form of a transglobal medical-industrial-media complex, with news consumers corralled into platforms scrubbed of controversial content by the monopolistic owners, at the behest of governments under regulatory capture.
But we’re not quite there yet. The whack-a-mole efforts at policing contrarian scientists and rogue commentators online isn’t total. At of the time of writing, a June 17 Canadian parliamentary press conference on the censoring of doctors and scientists is still up on Youtube. Dr. Bridle’s testimony is here.
The hosts of DarkHorse haven’t been airbrushed out of history either; Weinstein and Heying realized they could only speak freely by moving to another hosting platform. You can now find the ThoughtCrime-peddling pair here at Odysee.
I didn't have time to read this today, Geoff, but when I saw the photos, it made me think of this very interesting little book I'm reading, called "Why I Write, by the author of Animal Farm, George Orwell. I think you would like it. cheers and I'll get to reading this soon, all the best,
Cath Morris -poet
After watching a little bit Dark Horse I've found them to be almost comical in how scrupulous and meticulous they are in fact checking and generally hedging around what they are presenting so as not to convey even a hint of misinformation. It's criminal that people like this should be censored.