A U.S. senator is speaking out against censorship after an unbelievable move by Big Tech.
According to Fox News, Republican Ron Johnson (WI) blasted YouTube during an appearance on Fox & Friends Thursday for allegedly removing a video from its platform that showed a doctor’s testimony before the Senate about the effectiveness of a widely available drug in treating COVID-19.
Johnson alleged in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal earlier in the week that the Google-owned company “had ratcheted up censorship to a new level,” Fox News reported.
“World-renowned”
The doctor at the center of the controversy is Pierre Kory, who Johnson said testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in early December 2020 about the effectiveness of a drug called ivermectin.
In his testimony, Kory highlighted a study out of Argentina that, according to Fox, “showed promising results.” Johnson wrote Tuesday:
[Kory] described a just-published study from Argentina in which about 800 health-care workers received ivermectin and 400 didn’t. Not one of the 800 contracted Covid-19; 58% of the 400 did.
What’s more, the drug is also widely available, as it’s used to treat parasitic diseases, and costs roughly $20, Johnson noted.
“Dr. Kory is part of a world-renowned group of physicians who developed a groundbreaking use of corticosteroids to treat hospitalized Covid patients. His testimony at a May Senate hearing helped doctors rethink treatment protocols and saved lives,” the senator wrote.
“It’s a travesty”
But video of Kory’s talk no longer available on YouTube, Johnson told Fox. “I got notified Jan. 27 that it just wasn’t passing the YouTube censors, so they are going to take it down off of [their] website and they also took it off of Fox News Now’s,” the senator said. “I think it still may be available on some lesser sites with far fewer views but this is dangerous when you have censorship of information.”
Prior to that, the video had amassed millions of views since the Dec. 8 hearing, Johnson asserted.
So why the censorship? In a statement to Fox, YouTube said it enforces its “community guidelines consistently, regardless of speaker and without regard to political viewpoints. In accordance with our COVID-19 misinformation policy, we removed the two videos in question,” the company said, according to a report from Sinclair Broadcast Group.
But Johnson has a different point of view. “Could it be because Remdesivir for example is $3,200 for a treatment and these drugs are about $20 for a treatment?” he asked Thursday, according to Fox.
“Maybe it’s that economic incentive, but it’s a travesty regardless, and [so is] the fact that you have these frontline doctors that are risking their lives, having the courage and compassion to actually treat patients, versus the [National Institutes of Health] guidelines, which basically say go home, isolate yourself, be afraid, do nothing until you get sick enough, and then we’ll try and save your life in the hospital,” the senator added.
The post Sen. Johnson decries ‘censorship’ by YouTube: ‘This is dangerous’ first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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