Facebook and Twitter removed posts from President Donald Trump late Wednesday, citing COVID-19 misinformation.
A Facebook policy spokesperson, Andy Stone, said in a statement to news outlets that the video “includes false claims that a group of people is immune from Covid-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful Covid misinformation.” The spokesperson added that Trump’s comments regarding children being almost immune to the virus had violated Facebook rules.
Trump’s social media posts have been removed from Facebook multiple times before, however, this marks the first time the president’s post was removed from Facebook due to sharing COVID-19 commentary that the platform has deemed misinformation.
In response to Facebook and Twitter’s removals, Courtney Parella, deputy national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a statement to The Epoch Times: “Another day, another display of Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias against this President, where the rules are only enforced in one direction.”
“Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth,” she added. “The President was stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus.”
Parella also wrote, “The Twitter employee who explained why our account was suspended is also Kamala Harris’s former press secretary.”
At a press conference on Wednesday, Trump was asked about his comments to Fox News regarding children being “almost immune.”
“When I say that I’m talking about [immune] from getting very sick, I mean, if you look at children, I mean, they’re able to throw it off very easily,” he replied. “And it’s an amazing thing, because some flus, they don’t, they get very sick, and they have problems with flus and they have problems with other things, but for whatever reason, [with regard to] the China virus, children handle it very well.
“And they may get it, but they get it and it doesn’t have much of an impact on them, and if you look at the numbers, the numbers in terms of mortality, fatality, the numbers for children under a certain age, meaning young, their immune systems are very very strong, they’re very powerful, they seem to be able to handle it very well, and that’s according to every statistic.”
“Children appear to be at lower risk for contracting COVID-19 compared to adults,” the guidelines state.
Further, the CDC said, there are few reports of children being the “primary drivers” of the spread of COVID-19 in schools, or in the community.
“No studies are conclusive, but the available evidence provides reason to believe that in-person schooling is in the best interest of students, particularly in the context of appropriate mitigation measures similar to those implemented at essential workplaces,” the CDC said.
The CDC acknowledged that “relatively little” is known about how the CCP virus spreads to children.
“While uncommon, deaths and rare illness … may occur,” the agency said.
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