Trust in the scientific method, not in science per se.
And you cannot have the scientific method without trials and debate.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a prominent epidemiologist and biostatistician and former Harvard School of Medicine professor, said he was “not surprised” after seeing concrete evidence that a post he shared on Twitter was flagged and prevented from wider dissemination.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist and statistician. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
He expressed disapproval and said that the social media giant’s overall censorship actions have stifled free debate on COVID-19 topics and undermined trust in science.
In the latest installment of the Elon Musk-endorsed “Twitter Files” published early on Dec. 26, journalist David Zweig shared how posts from Kulldorff and several others about COVID-19, including about vaccines, were flagged and censored in various ways by Twitter.
It marked the first trove of direct evidence from the “Twitter Files” showing how Twitter censored scientists, potentially at the behest of the U.S. government, ever since journalist Bari Weiss revealed in early December that Stanford University professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had been put on a blacklist due to his views on COVID-19-related lockdowns and school closures.
While Kulldorff said he was not surprised by evidence showing how he and others were censored, he said Twitter should not be the arbiter of which scientists have valid views, and that such censorship shouldn’t happen.
“There should be an open discussion. You can’t expect people to trust public health and trust the scientific community if you don’t have that open communication and open debate,” Kulldorff told The Epoch Times.
In the Twitter post of concern, dated March 26, 2021, Kulldorff said that children and those who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 do not need to be vaccinated, but that vaccines were important for older high-risk people and their caretakers. The post was flagged by a Twitter moderator as having violated the company’s COVID-19 “misinformation policy.”
An internal email shared by Zweig showed that the moderator claimed Kulldorff had shared “false information regarding the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which goes against CDC guidelines.” Twitter subsequently labeled the post as “misleading” and turned off all likes and replies.
“But Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one which also happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed ‘false information’ by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines,” Zweig wrote.
“After Twitter took action, Kulldorff’s tweet was slapped with a ‘Misleading’ label and all replies and likes were shut off, throttling the tweet’s ability to be seen and shared by many people, the ostensible core function of the platform.”
By Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times.