The following is a news analysis.
The documentary ‘Died Suddenly’ aired live on Twitter on November 21. By November 23 it had more than 7 million views, including 5.2 million views on Rumble.
Clearly there is a lot of interest in the subject matter: the broad increase in all-cause deaths after the introduction of the Covid vaccines, and alleged adverse events related to the vaccinations.
On November 23, the Died Suddenly Twitter account tweeted out a message showing that someone at Twitter had censored the platform’s replay of the documentary by making it not able to be shared, liked, or replied to. Further, Twitter slapped a label the documentary with an ironic warning; ironic because the warning purports to be in line with factual scientific information, but the label is, itself, woefully unscientific.
The label stated:
Misleading Learn why health officials consider COVID-19 vaccines safe for most people.
Twitter has decided to label the #DiedSuddenly movie stream “misleading” and has made it so it cant be shared, liked, or replied to. pic.twitter.com/6cd99OtSE6
— DiedSuddenly (@DiedSuddenly_) November 23, 2022
There are multiple reasons why the Twitter label makes no sense, and is itself misleading. And it is reflection of similar warnings placed on material on Facebook and YouTube.
First, it doesn’t specify which “health officials” consider Covid-19 vaccines “safe for most people.” This is true of some health officials, but there are many thousands, if not millions, who have expressed disagreement. So Twitter is cherry-picking one side of the equation without balance in order to give a misleading picture of the information landscape.
Second, the reason it gives for the documentary being misleading is that “health officials consider COVID-19 vaccines safe for most people.”
By the Twitter standard, apparently, a vaccine could kill 49% of people but would still be “safe for most people” (51%) and, therefore, any documentary raising issues would be “misleading.”
Of course that’s ridiculous.
But beyond that, even if it is true that some health officials consider vaccines safe for most, the Twitter warning is also misleading because “safe for most people” is not the bar that a vaccine or other medicine must meet in the US to be approved as safe and effective.
In fact, a medicine that’s considered quite safe but not very effective may face scrutiny and ultimately be pulled from the market.
Additionally, under FDA standards, a medicine does not need to have a great deal of reports of injury for it to qualify as too dangerous to be sold. Medicines that apparently hurt or kill a relative few are sometimes pulled from the market under an imprecise calculus that government does trying to figure out the true risks and benefits of the drug.
As a CBS News investigative reporter years ago, I covered the liver damage issues with the diabetes drug Rezulin. It was withdrawn from the market after “just” a handful of deaths. Apparently, some of the Twitter information minders today would claim, unscientifically, that the withdrawal was unwarranted because Rezulin seemed “safe for most people.” In fact, even if it helped some people, the FDA concluded the overall risks were unwarranted.
That’s when I first learned that one adverse event reported officially about a medicine can translate to between 10,000 and 100,000 more that go unreported, according to scientists.
Back to “Died Suddenly.”
A number of high profile accounts on Twitter complained to new Twitter CEO directly about the warning and inability to play the documentary. Within a matter of hours, the warning appeared to be lifted.
This could be a major positive step in the social media propaganda war that had largely been won by pharmaceutical interests and their powerful advocates. They have been extremely successful at controlling the online information landscape in such a way that it often made true information appear false, and false information seem true.
A better Twitter recognizes that those trying the hardest to censor and control are too often guilty of promulgating propaganda and false information themselves.
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