Last week, a top official with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) apparently filed a bogus copyright claim to get a critic's YouTube account taken down. This is an inappropriate act of censorship that, not long ago, conservatives would rightly have stood against.
"Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist in New York City, received an email from YouTube on Friday night, which stated that Vinay Prasad, who is the FDA's top vaccine regulator, had demanded the removal of six videos of himself from Howard's YouTube channel," The Guardian reported this week. "Howard's entire channel has now been deleted by YouTube, which cited copyright infringement."
On his channel, Howard hosted videos of public health officials—including Prasad, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya—making statements during the COVID-19 pandemic that turned out to be untrue or overly myopic. "I had accumulated about 350 videos, almost all of which were short clips of famous doctors saying absurd things," Howard wrote in a blog post, "that herd immunity had arrived in the spring of 2021 and that RFK Jr. was an honest broker about vaccines, for example." Howard is also critical of Prasad's stance on vaccines, which Prasad now has the authority to regulate.
