YouTube Suddenly Deletes Video of DeSantis’s COVID-19 Roundtable

YouTube Suddenly Deletes Video of DeSantis’s COVID-19 Roundtable
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gestures during a news conference at the Manatee County Emergency Management office in Palmetto, Fla., on April 4, 2021. (Chris O'Meara/AP Photo)
Jack Phillips
4/8/2021
Updated:
4/8/2021

YouTube took down a video of a roundtable conference hosted by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, which featured former White House coronavirus task force member and medical scholar Dr. Scott Atlas and the three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

“The efforts in Florida to protect the elderly while permitting the rest of society to function normally led to a success that has been celebrated the world over. It causes major disruption to the lockdown narrative that the only way to suppress a virus is to suppress rights and freedoms,” the American Institute for Economic Research stated.

It added that the roundtable “came to serve as a tutorial in the relationship between public policy and virus mitigation.”

The March 18 video featured Atlas as well as Harvard professor of medicine Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Oxford professor of epidemiology Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford professor of medicine and epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

On April 7, YouTube “suddenly deleted the entire video from its platform,” according to the institute.

When trying to access the video, one sees the YouTube message, “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”

YouTube officials didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment. YouTube, which is owned by Google, hasn’t issued a public comment on the matter.

“This policy has now run afoul of the basic needs of public health messaging, science, and sound policy decision making, even to the point of removing a serious forum of a popular government along with his scientific advisors from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford universities,” the American Institute for Economic Research stated.

Several weeks ago, YouTube confirmed that it removed a video from conservative commentator Steven Crowder for allegedly violating the platform’s content policies regarding COVID-19.

“This video violates our COVID-19 misinformation policy, which prohibits content claiming that the death rates of COVID-19 are less severe or equally as severe as the common cold or seasonal flu,” YouTube said in a statement in March to Bloomberg News. “As a result, the video was removed from Steven Crowder’s channel.”
Jack Phillips is a breaking news reporter with 15 years experience who started as a local New York City reporter. Having joined The Epoch Times' news team in 2009, Jack was born and raised near Modesto in California's Central Valley. Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/jackphillips5
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