Preamble
I had written in my blog Ban Twitter | Kapil Khandelwal (KK) last year as Twitter refused to follow Indian regulations and also muzzle certain sections of religious and political voices and opinion from India by banning or suspending their twitter handle. Under the leadership of the New CEO, Twitter seems to be adjudicating opinion on Life Sciences and that too experts. The latest controversial account suspension is of Dr. Robert Malone.
Who Is Dr Robert Malone? Robert W Malone MD (rwmalonemd.com)
Malone is the father of mRNA vaccines. mRNA is the same technology used in COVID vaccines by Pfizer, J&J, etc in the US. He has served as an adjunct associate professor of biotechnology at Kennesaw State University, and he co-founded Atheric Pharmaceutical, a company that was contracted by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in 2016. Malone has long been an outspoken critic of the global COVID vaccine rollout, warning of the risks of a rushed release and saying normal procedures have not been followed throughout the process. He has been crusading to stop vaccines from being mandated for children, and to stop corruption in the government and the medical-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries.
He had over half a million followers on his Twitter account. On 27 December 2021, his account was permanently suspended for not adhering to Twitter’s Covid 19 misinformation policy.
He can still be followed via his substack page.
Muzzling Divergent Scientific Opinion on Social Media
As this pandemic is playing out, the so called official expert spokesperson of the US Government have been proven time and again how wrong they have been in guiding the public. In fact on of the experts and advisor to the US President, had gone on to rubbish the work of our scientist at IIT Delhi who published that they discovered four insertions in the spike glycoprotein of the Covid-19 virus which they say are not present in other coronaviruses. These experts have been using social media to guide or misguide the masses. As a result, the public opinion on the official experts is now suspect and individuals now want to assess both sides of the scientific views before excessing their personal judgement.
Twitter does not possess scientific material peer reviewers to state whether a certain scientific opinion is valid or not. It can at most highlight as not peer reviewed by a wider scientific community. This sort of baning scientific expert opinion is a dangerous trend. In future, the big-pharma can short change the scientific community’s opinion by muzzling their voices and views on social media. For the individuals who are interested in knowing the scientific voices will have to now put pressure for a much open, unbiased social media to allow for alternative scientific views to emerge.