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Dr. Knut WittkowskiHelayne Seidman<\/p><\/div>\n
Big Tech companies are aggressively tamping down on COVID-19 \u201cmisinformation\u201d \u2014 opinions and ideas contrary to official pronouncements.<\/p>\n
Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University, says YouTube removed a video of him talking about the virus which had racked up more than 1.3 million views.<\/p>\n
Wittkowski, 65, is a ferocious critic of the nation\u2019s current steps to fight the coronavirus. He has derided social distancing, saying it only prolongs the virus\u2019 existence and has attacked the current lockdown as mostly unnecessary.<\/p>\n
Wittkowski, who holds two doctorates in computer science and medical biometry, believes the coronavirus should be allowed to achieve \u201cherd immunity,\u201d and that short of a vaccine the pandemic will only end after it has sufficiently spread through the population.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won\u2019t even have recognized that they were infected,\u201d he says in the now-deleted video.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was just explaining what we had,\u201d Wittkowski told The Post of the video, saying he had no idea why it was removed. The footage was produced by the British film company Journeyman Pictures.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t tell you. They just say it violates our community standards. There\u2019s no explanation for what those standards are or what standards it violated.\u201d<\/p>\n
In articles and interviews across the web, he has likened COVID-19 to a \u201cbad flu.\u201d That likely made him a target for YouTube, which said in April it would be \u201cremoving information that is problematic\u201d about the pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnything that goes against [World Health Organization] recommendations would be a violation of our policy and so removal is another really important part of our policy,\u201d CEO Susan Wojcicki\u00a0told CNN<\/a>.<\/p>\n Wittkowski\u2019s argument is a minority opinion among his colleagues, but still well within mainstream thought and currently is the basis for Sweden\u2019s non-lockdown approach to the pandemic.<\/p>\n The embattled WHO, however, is not a fan, with the group\u2019s executive director of health emergencies, Mike Ryan, this week calling it \u201ca really dangerous, dangerous calculation.\u201d<\/p>\n Rockefeller University \u2014 Wittkowski\u2019s employer for 20 years \u2014 also released a statement\u00a0sharply distancing themselves<\/a>\u00a0from him last month.<\/p>\n While the doctor might have been too hot for YouTube, he has found a home at the\u00a0American Institute for Economic Research<\/a>, which is currently hosting the video online.<\/p>\n Across social media, censors have been racing to limit the flow of verboten information.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have broadened our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information,\u201d Twitter said in April shortly after removing two tweets by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.<\/p>\n That same month Facebook conceded they had been\u00a0working with state governments<\/a>\u00a0in California, New Jersey and Nebraska to remove pages for anti-quarantine events.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the kind of totalitarian thinking and conduct that has cost millions of lives in recent world history. The fact that it\u2019s being done by private companies and not government doesn\u2019t change that,\u201d Ron Coleman, a prominent First Amendment lawyer, told The Post.<\/p>\n Wittkowski, however, says history has already vindicated his earlier position that the old and immunocompromised alone should have been strictly isolated, which\u00a0The Post reported in March<\/a>.<\/p>\n Roughly one-third of all US COVID-19 deaths have been among nursing-home patients and staff, a problem which Wittkowski says was deeply exacerbated in New York by Gov. Cuomo\u2019s March 25 executive order requiring nursing homes to accept individuals with the virus.<\/p>\n