'Dangerous' for YouTube to remove doctor's Senate testimony on COVID: Sen. Johnson
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson blasts the censorship of the Senate hearing exploring cheaper drug treatments on 'Fox & Friends.'
Dr. Pierre Kory is speaking out after YouTube took drastic action by removing his recent Senate testimony that discussed a promising coronavirus treatment.
Kory, the president of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee in December and spoke about ivermectin, which the FLCCC Alliance describes as an "FDA-approved anti-parasitic agent" that "had been shown in numerous controlled trials around the world to prevent and treat COVID-19."
The drug, which is used to treat tropical diseases caused by parasites, showed promising results in a study performed in Argentina last year. In the study, 788 healthcare workers received ivermectin, while another 407 did not. Not a single person who received ivermectin contracted COVID-19, while more than half of the group who did not receive ivermectin did contract the virus.
One of the most promient COVID patients who recovered while taking ivermectin was Academy Award-winning actor Louis Gossett Jr.
'DANGEROUS' FOR YOUTUBE TO REMOVE DOCTOR'S SENATE TESTIMONY ON CORONAVIRUS TREATMENT: RON JOHNSON
Last week, however, YouTube removed the physician's testimony from CSPAN's channel.
The FLCCC Alliance slammed YouTube's actions in a press release, stating in part, "During a devastating pandemic, it is arguably more dangerous for social media giants like YouTube to indiscriminately discredit and summarily remove official government information given under oath by world renowned medical experts ... all while people are dying in horrific numbers."
A spokesperson for YouTube defended its actions, stating "We enforce our Community Guidelines considently, regardless of speaker and without regard to political viewpoints. In accordance with our COVID-19 misinformation policy, we removed the two videos in question."
Speaking to Fox News, Dr. Kory called YouTube's decision "extremely misguided" and claimed that its suppression efforts are censoring "new important information" from "highly credentialed sources such as ourselves" in addition to actual misinformation.
YOUTUBE'S 'DANGEROUS' CRACKDOWN ON INDEPENDENT JOURNALISTS: 'IT DEFIES ALL LOGIC AND REASON'
"YouTube is not interested in allowing breaking medical information to be disseminated on its platform apparently. Terrible and harmful missed opportunity," Kory told Fox News. "It thus places the risk of medical misinformation more important than preserving the benefits of new, benficial information. It also assumes that medical misinformation cannot be assessed in an accurate way by private citizens and thus they have to 'protect' us from ... information? Wow, is that not only a slippery slope but in contradiciton to one of our most valued founding principles as a country."
Kory he was "unsurprised" by YouTube's recent actions since he was "already made aware of that testimony video being taken down from numerous other people’s Youtube channels," but questioned the timing.
"Why this week? After two months of it accumulating a massive amount of views?" Kory wondered.
Kory argued that YouTube is negating the "follow the science" mantra pushed by top government officials across the country, including the Biden administration, saying the tech giant is "only following the science made available to them by 'trusted' leading agencies and not researchers and clinicians on the ground who always have been and always will be deep sources of breaking scientific information."
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"Thus their slogan is more accurately 'follow only our selected scientific sources,'" the physician said.
Kory is urging YouTube to "stop censoring" and "trust the individual’s capacity to assess misinformation," stressing that "it will not be perfect but will always be better than censorship."
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