Epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was placed on a blacklist held by Twitter after he argued Covid lockdowns would harm children
Epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was placed on a blacklist held by the social media platform after he argued Covid lockdowns would harm children.
On Sunday, Bhattacharya revealed how he spent Saturday at Twitter's San Francisco HQ after being invited to meet with Musk and uncover more about the blacklist he was added to.
'Twitter 1.0 placed me on the blacklist on the first day I joined in August 2021,' the professor tweeted. 'I think it was my pinned tweet linking to the @gbdeclaration that triggered the blacklist based on unspecified complaints Twitter received.'
Twitter 1.0 refers to the firm's censorious initial incarnation, before free-speech fan Musk bought it earlier this year.
Bhattacharya is a tenured professor at Stanford, who previously co-authored a letter in 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration, which stated how the lockdowns were damaging.
The Stanford professor joined Twitter in 2021, a year after he wrote the controversial letter together with Indian-born British infectious disease epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta and former professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Martin Kulldorff.
The letter addressed the pandemic and its implications from a global public health and humanitarian perspective with a focus on how Covid-19 strategies were forcing children, the working class, and poor to carry the heaviest burden.
'Twitter 1.0 rejected requests for verification by me and @MartinKulldorff. Each time the reasoning (never conveyed to us) was that we were not notable enough. They should have asked Francis Collins -- he would have vouched for our standing as 'fringe epidemiologists,' Bhattacharya continued.
'It will take some time to find out more about what led Twitter 1.0 to act so imperiously, but I am grateful to @elonmusk, who has promised access to help find out. I will report the results on Twitter 2.0, where transparency and free speech rule,' he tweeted.
Musk later responded in kind tweeting: 'Thank you for your rigorous adherence to science.'
In October 2020, Bhattacharya together with professors from Harvard and Oxford Universities published The Great Barrington Declaration, which championed herd immunity — the notion that Covid would stop spreading after everyone had contracted it.
The White House supported the paper, and used it to try and push for schools and businesses to be allowed to open back up.
But Dr Anthony Fauci dismissed the concept of herd immunity as 'total nonsense' and 'ridiculous', adding that it would 'lead to hospitalizations and deaths'.
However, when reflecting on the decision to close schools, Dr Fauci told ABC News last month: 'We should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that.
'That's the reason why I continually would say on any media appearances I've had: "We've got to do everything we can to keep the schools open." The most important thing is to protect the children.'
He has also repeatedly insisted that Covid did not leak from a lab in China.
Last week, Bhattacharya appeared on the Ricochet podcast with conservative host James Lileks to discuss his inability to be verified on Twitter.
'It turns out James that I'm on a blacklist which I thought the United States kind of put behind us in like the 1950s but I guess that's the modern way now,' Bhattacharya said. 'What happens with this kind of mechanism of social control is to tell the world that this idea is too dangerous to discuss. This person is too dangerous to think about.'
After appearing on various news channels to share his views on the pandemic and ramping up a following of about 290,000, it appeared as if the social media giant didn't want to give him the blue checkmark.
'I had some success, but I applied three times to become verified and they turned me down,' Bhattacharya said.
Journalist Bari Weiss confirmed on Thursday that the professor was on Twitter's blacklist, along with other public figures that questioned the severity of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
At the time, Specialist teams were put to work dealing with 200 cases a day.
Conservative commentators, including Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, were also deliberately put on a 'search blacklist' in Bongino's case or tabbed 'do not amplify,' in the case of Kirk
'It's basically a social credit system, right? It's a system designed to... tell people look I'm bad [and] I have dangerous ideas, don't listen to me,' Bhattacharya continued. 'I think that's really the purpose of something like that like it's not possible for the internet to squelch ideas if they happen.'
Reader Comments
same old, Cult Of Personality.
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Maybe things are speeding up, again?
There is a deadline for project execution? Sometime in APRIL, maybe?
Merry Christmas and all the best to you and yours!
It's easy to forget how blessed we are. Can you imagine muddling through this, blind? Would be soul-shattering.
We just need to hang on.. I keep saying.
Thanks so much! And to you also :))
As John Wooden, the basketball coach, taught, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."
Now, Musk - the great and ultimate trap?
However, in a strange plot twist, we may find that the upcoming technocratic society regulated by AI and social credit system is the STO world we have been prepared for.
Anything's possible, I guess.
This article points to another: "the social media giant didn't want to give him the blue checkmark ". Musk has changed the "blue checkmark" to a check mark within a yellow circle. As one journalist noted, "yellow journalism", which is what they called the lying media in the late 19th and early 20th century.