Vaccine Critic Banned by Major Social Media Site, Campaign Pages Blocked
Twitter owner Elon Musk invited Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a discussion on his Twitter Spaces after Kennedy said his campaign was suspended by Meta-owned Instagram.
“Interesting… when we use our TeamKennedy email address to set up @instagram accounts we get an automatic 180-day ban. Can anyone guess why that’s happening?” he wrote on Twitter. An accompanying image shows that Instagram said it “suspended” his “Team Kennedy” account and that there “are 180 days remaining to disagree” with the company’s decision.
In response to his post, Musk wrote: “Would you like to do a Spaces discussion with me next week?” Kennedy agreed, saying he would do it Monday at 2 p.m. ET.
Hours later, Kennedy wrote that Instagram “still hasn’t reinstated my account, which was banned years ago with more than 900k followers.” He argued that “to silence a major political candidate is profoundly undemocratic.”
“Social media is the modern equivalent of the town square,” the candidate, who is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, wrote. “How can democracy function if only some candidates have access to it?”
It’s not the first time that either Facebook or Instagram has taken action against Kennedy. In 2021, Instagram banned him from posting claims about vaccine safety and COVID-19.
After he was banned by the platform, Kennedy said that his Instagram posts raised legitimate concerns about vaccines and were backed by research. His account was banned just days after Facebook and Instagram announced they would block the spread of what they described as misinformation about vaccines, including research saying the shots cause autism, are dangerous, or are ineffective.
“This kind of censorship is counterproductive if our objective is a safe and effective vaccine supply,” he said at the time.
Kennedy, the son of former presidential candidate and Sen. Robert Kennedy, has for years helped to popularize the assertion that vaccines are liked to autism. Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense, before it was also banned on Facebook and Instagram in 2022, claimed that tetanus vaccines can cause infertility and that polio vaccines are actually responsible for a rise in polio cases worldwide.
However, critics of Big Tech monopolies have said social media companies should not be the arbiters of what can and cannot be posted, saying that some content moderation policies around “misinformation” is tantamount to censorship.
That criticism reached a boiling point in early 2021 after former President Donald Trump was banned on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other Big Tech sites before his accounts were mostly reinstated. A number of other prominent conservatives and individuals who questioned mainstream narratives were also banned in 2021 and 2022.
Because of the widespread bans that were handed down, some alternative social media websites like Trump’s Truth Social, video platform Rumble, Gettr, and others were created. When Musk bought Twitter late last year, he moved to reinstate a number of prominent conservative accounts, including Trump’s page, although the former president hasn’t yet used it and currently posts on Truth Social.
Censored for ’18 Years’
During his 2024 presidential announcement, Kennedy said that he’s been censored “for 18 years,” likely due to his claims about vaccines. “They shouldn’t have shut me up that long,” he said, adding that he’s “really” going to “let loose on them for the next 18 months.”
In an interview with CNN days later, Kennedy was asked about who censored him and why. He responded by saying that at least a dozen Democrat attorney generals recently had contacted social media sites to “censor me” and said that there is now “clear evidence” via the Twitter Files reporting that White House officials colluded with Big Tech to suppress his accounts.
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Low COVID-19 Pediatric Vax Rates: Parents Concerned about Long-Term Effects of mRNA Vaccines & Responsibility
A recent study conducted by the Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) at the University of Southern California (USC) Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences investigates why COVID-19 rates among children are so low. The study led by research scientist Ying Liu and colleagues finds that parents worry about long-term risks associated with the COVID-19 vaccines, not to mention the responsibility of being at fault should their children become ill after the inoculation procedure.
Recently published in Pediatrics, the USC Dornsife team surveyed parents in the Understanding America Study during the Omicron variant’s surge between February and March 2022, when pediatric COVID-19 cases peaked. The Southern California-led team covers the topic of lower COVID-19 vaccine rates across the pediatric population.
For example, while 92% of adults have received COVID-19 vaccination, only 39% of children 5 to 11 and 68% of persons 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated.
The study results reveal that 45% of parents believed the vaccine’s long-term risks to their child outweighed the risks of not being vaccinated. 18% of the surveyed parents articulated that they would feel responsible if their child became sick post-vaccination.
According to study lead, Liu, “Parents’ hesitancy may be partly driven by apprehension about the vaccine, stemming from its rapid development and the use of newer techniques.”
"People often exhibit a more cautious approach when making medical decisions for others, including their own children, than for themselves,” Liu said. “Some tend to do nothing rather than vaccinate their child, even though such inaction could result in negative consequences.”
The study authors appear substantially focused on the driving goal of increasing the COVID-19 vaccination rate of young people, less a deeper look into parental concerns.
Parental concerns about the prospect of the COVID-19 vaccine's long-term effects aren’t irrational. The COVID-19 vaccines (the current commercial investigational products) have not been studied long-term. True, mRNA-based vaccines and therapies have been under investigation for a few decades, but actual commercial products are just a few years old. TrialSite has reported before on Moderna in its investor disclosure reports in 2019 and 2020, indicating the totally novel nature of the mRNA vaccine products.
In fact, the current bivalent COVID-19 vaccines now in circulation remain investigational and under emergency use authorization. The versions of the vaccine that were licensed/approved (monovalent primary series of both Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna) have been scrapped by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in favor of the investigational bivalent products.
While some studies suggest the risks of myocarditis/pericarditis associated with mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines are substantially less than the risk associated with COVID-19 itself, other studies reveal a disturbingly high incidence of cardiovascular-related adverse events associated with the vaccines.
The FDA has authorized the bivalent COVID-19 (original strain and BA.4/BA.5) vaccine now as the only product available for children aged 6 months and up. The overall vaccination rate associated with experimental (investigational) released in September 2022 hovers at about 20% for all eligible Americans. Clearly, some concerns accumulate across society about the COVID-19 vaccines.
Concerns about myocarditis for example should be discussed openly—not discounted while other COVID-19 pediatric risk-benefit factors such as state and severity of the virus, variant, infection rate and natural immunity from previous infection all need to be understood as part of an unfolding pediatric-based` risk-benefit analyses.
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The European left’s fascism fantasy
France, Sweden, Italy, Finland and now Spain. The demise of the left in western Europe continues apace and yet their only solution is to seethe about fascists in a make believe world of their own.
Nine months after Giorgia Meloni was elected Prime Minister – remember the hysterical warnings about her being Mussolini in heels – the only horror the Italian left has experienced is electoral wipeout. At last weekend’s local elections, Meloni’s conservative Brothers of Italy party romped to victory in many towns that were once staunchly Socialist. As a jubilant Meloni crowed: ‘Strongholds [of the left] no longer exist.’
Nine months after Giorgia Meloni was elected Prime Minister, the only horror the Italian left has experienced is electoral wipeout
At the same time Italians were endorsing Meloni, Spanish voters showed what they thought of the ruling Socialist Workers’ party in their local and religion elections. Not much. The big winners were the Popular party and Vox, prompting a rattled Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to call a snap general election. According to El Pais his Socialist party needs ‘a miracle to halt the conservative wave that has already swept through several European countries’.
Vox have in the past been compared to the Nazi party, though these days the left sees Hitler and Mussolini on every street corner. Querying the wisdom of mass immigration is one short goosestep from fascism, as is sticking up for the traditional family structure or simply waving your country’s flag.
When Meloni was elected Prime Minister of Italy in September the news wasn’t well received by her French counterpart. One might have expected Elisabeth Borne – a Socialist by breeding before she jumped ship to Macron’s centrist party – to be the first on the phone to celebrate Girl Power. Instead Borne gave a masterclass in pomposity, declaring that Meloni better adhere to European ‘values’, or else.
Borne was on her high horse again on Sunday, using an interview to describe Marine Le Pen’s National Rally as the ‘heir to Pétain’, and warning against any ‘normalisation’ of the party.
Borne’s reference to Marshal Philippe Pétain’s wartime Vichy government has infuriated Le Pen’s party, and even irritated Emmanuel Macron. During a Council of Ministers on Tuesday the president upbraided his Prime Minister by stating that ‘you won’t be able to make millions of French people who voted for the far right believe that they are fascists.’
Such tactics might have worked in the 1990s, added the president, ‘but the fight against the far right no longer involves moral arguments.’
Macron is correct. Had Borne, the daughter of a holocaust survivor, made her comments three decades earlier she would have been on firmer ground. When Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, founded the National Front in 1972 it contained some very unpleasant individuals, including the vice-president, who served in the Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary wing, and the treasurer, who fought for the French Charlemagne Division in the Waffen SS.
Then again, the Socialist party of the 1970s also contained some dubious characters, such as its leader, Francois Mitterrand. He worked for the Vichy regime in the early years of the war and, during his 14 years as president, he steadfastly refused to apologise for the complicity of France in deporting 74,100 Jews to concentration camps. The Vichy police chief who organised the deportation, Rene Bousquet, was a friend of Mitterrand after the war.
The Vichy period was a complex one for the Republic. As Julian Jackson wrote in France: The Dark Years 1940-1944: ‘The collaborationist world was not homogeneous – it contained pacifists and fascists, Socialists and Catholics… collaborationist politics was a vipers’ nest of hatreds.’
More to the point, that period is in in the past and it is best left alone by 21st century politicians. The same is true in Italy; it’s the present that matters and Meloni’s popularity tells its own story.
So does Le Pen’s, whose party is widely acknowledged to have emerged from the pension reform saga in the best shape. Recent opinion polls indicate that she is enjoying unprecedented levels of approval among the electorate.
The National Rally are also benefiting from the rampant lawlessness engulfing France and the lack of any coherent government strategy to tackle the growing immigration crisis.
These issues explain the recent successes of socially conservative parties throughout most of continental Europe. In truth, however, their popularity has as much to do with voters’ rejection of radical progressivism, the aggressive and divisive dogma that has so intoxicated the left this century.
Politicians like Elisabeth Borne should stop wasting words demonising the opposition and focus their energy on how they can normalise the left.
Too many on the European left have turned their backs on their traditional bases. They have courted middle-class students and urban elites, pandering to their esoteric social justice obsessions while sneering at the working-class respect for faith, flag and family. Nor do they seem particularly bothered about the crises in health, education and social housing.
That is why Meloni is Prime Minister and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally have 88 MPs in the National Assembly; not because they are fascists but because they have replaced the left.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/the-european-lefts-fascism-fantasy/
********************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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