A YouTube channel archiving statements from Trump administration officials was censored by one of them: Vinay Prasad. Now a top official at the Food and Drug Administration, Prasad demanded the removal of videos showing him criticizing the vaccines he now regulates. The uploader was Jonathan Howard, a neurologist, and he says YouTube has deleted the whole channel on copyright infringement grounds.
The now-defunct channel contained about 350 videos of doctors and commentators, including Prasad, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services, and Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the National Institutes of Health, which had been collected by Howard from their social media accounts, interviews and podcasts.
Creating the channel, Howard told Guardian in an interview, had been an attempt to "preserve" what these individuals had said during the early years of the pandemic, including comments that Howard said exaggerated the dangers of the Covid vaccine to children and – in some cases – minimized the risk of Covid infection, among other issues. … "These videos were nothing more than collections of what other doctors said during the pandemic, including doctors who are extremely influential and who are now the medical establishment," he said.
YouTube knows when copyright claims are specious, but built its system from the ground up to please rightsholders. It deleted the channel to meet Prasad's demand for censorship, not because it concluded (or even considered) whether the infringement claim was credible.
"In the past," Stephanie Kirchgaessner points out, "Prasad has complained about censorship by social media companies."
Prasad was previously in the news for resigning from his position when a MAGA influencer wanted him gone, then returning to work days later. Mother Jones reported just today that he barely turns up to the office.
Howard blogged about his experience at Science-Based Medicine: "Americans do not need our government's permission to remember their words."
As a reminder, Dr. Prasad is a key leader of the FDA. He is the Medical Establishment. It's his job to be open and transparent with the citizens he serves. And though he refuses to answer questions from journalists and skip meetings with the industry he regulates, he has enough free time to seek out and erase his videos from a barely visible YouTube channel. …
To be clear, the loss of my YouTube channel is a trivial thing, and I promise not to make it the center of my identify. I won't make a Supreme Court case out of it or record lengthy videos about it- Prasad's Lecture is Cancelled from ACCP Conference b/c Online Haters. I won't sit down for self-pitying interviews with Bari Weiss, the Wall Street Journal, and Reason Magazine. I've been censored before, and I am not dramatic about such things. After all, my YouTube channel had 256 subscribers and its videos were typically seen by dozens of people, DOZENS! Its loss is a speck of dust compared to what RFK Jr. is destroying, and on one level, it both really funny and pathetic that Dr. Prasad would care so much about it.
