Femi Ashekun/
Twitter has banned Donald Trump Jr. from posting any tweets, claiming he shared “potentially harmful information” after posting a link yesterday evening to a viral video of a Nigerian-trained American-based Cameroonian doctor, Stella Immanuel, claiming hydroxychloroquine is a ‘cure’ for coronavirus.
The video was first published by Breitbart News, a right-wing medium co-founded by Steve Bannon, a former aide to American President, Donald Trump.
In the video, which was shot in front of the United States Supreme Court, Dr Immanuel is seen with seven others wearing white lab coats calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” and addressing the press.
During the press conference, she claims “you don’t need masks” to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and that recent studies showing hydroxychloroquine is ineffective for the treatment of Covid-19 are “fake science” sponsored by “fake pharma companies”.
“This virus has a cure, it’s called hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zithromax,” the woman claims. “You don’t need masks, there is a cure.”
The Twitter notice to the president’s eldest son reads, “We’ve temporarily limited some of your account features,” adding the restriction will be in effect for 12 hours.
“We have determined that this account violated the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for 1. Violating the policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19,” it says.
Andrew Surabian, a spokesman to Trump Jr., posted an image of the notice to Twitter this morning, lamenting, “Big Tech is the biggest threat to free expression in America today & they’re continuing to engage in open election interference – full stop.”
While the account is in this restricted state, he can still send direct messages on the platform and browse Twitter.
He will not, however, be able to tweet, retweet, follow new accounts or like anyone’s tweets.
President Trump, who is up for reelection in November, shared multiple versions of the video with his 84 million Twitter followers yesterday night.
The video quickly went viral on Facebook, becoming one of the top-performing posts on the platform with more than 14 million views before it was taken down Monday night for promoting misinformation. It was shared nearly 600,000 times, according to Crowdtangle, a data-analytics firm owned by Facebook.
“We’ve removed this video for sharing false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNN, adding that the platform is “showing messages in News Feed to people who have reacted to, commented on or shared harmful COVID-19-related misinformation that we have removed, connecting them to myths debunked by the WHO.”
Twitter worked to scrub the video late yesterday night after Trump shared versions of the video that amassed hundreds of thousands of views.
“We’re taking action in line with our Covid misinfo policy,” a Twitter spokesperson told CNN.
Twitter took action against the videos that Trump retweeted. By early this morning, the videos were no longer able to be viewed on his account.
The video was also removed by YouTube, where it had been viewed more than 40,000 times. Users attempting to access the video late yesterday were greeted with a message that says it has been removed for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
According to the website for America’s Frontline Doctors, the group is led by Dr Simone Gold, a Los Angeles-based emergency medicine specialist who has previously been featured on Fox News for her views that stay-at-home orders are harmful. Gold told the Associated Press in May she wanted to speak out against stay-home orders because there was “no scientific basis that the average American should be concerned” about COVID-19.
Scores of large, credible controlled studies including the 1,542-patient RECOVERY study in the UK and an NIH study, have found the hydroxychloroquine offered no benefit, compared to patients who were only given supportive care, like oxygen.
On the heels of the RECOVERY study, the WHO cancelled the hydroxychloroquine arm of its international SOLIDARITY trial of multiple potential coronavirus treatments on June 17.
It came just days after the FDA revoked its emergency use authorisation for the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. The agency had also previously posted a warning that the drug may cause dangerous heart arrhythmias.
On July 2, researchers from Henry Ford Health System published a study on hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus that caught the White House’s eye.
The study’s main finding was that death rates were 50 percent lower among patients who were treated with the controversial malaria drug. But the Detroit study was done in a manner far flung from the FDA’s ‘gold standard’ for conclusive research.
Research to determine whether a drug works is typically done as what’s called a randomized controlled trial. In this type of study, patients are assigned to either get the drug being tested, or a placebo. Neither doctors nor patients know who got which until the study ends.
The Detroit study was neither randomized, nor controlled.
It was observational, meaning researchers simply compared data on 2,541 COVID-19 patients who got all manner of treatments.
These types of studies are usually used to decide which drugs should undergo ‘gold standard’ testing, not which ones should be the gold standard of treatment.
In the simplest sense, those who got hydroxychloroquine were less likely to die – but they were also more likely to receive steroids, drugs which many studies suggest do work to combat the inflammation that kills many coronavirus sufferers.
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