Alex Berenson, conservative commentator, one-time New York Times reporter, and vaccine dissenter has been permanently banned from Twitter for, according to a Twitter spokesperson, “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”
According to Berenson, the tweet that got him banned was this:
It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it — at best — as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.
It is hard to sift information from misinformation on COVID and any number of other topics but I do NOT trust the meatheads at Twitter to take on that role in my life.
Looking at the above tweet, what is the misinformation? My understanding is that the vaccine is intended to be effective against hospitalization and death, but not necessarily against infection. It definitely does not prevent transmission. Even the CDC agrees on that point. (See this NPR article for more on vaccine effectiveness, or lack thereof, against infection and transmission.)
We’re already talking about booster shots, which implies “a limited window of efficacy.” “Dosed in advance” is true, right?
The side effect profile I don’t know enough about to characterize, but up until a few days ago when the Pfizer vaccine was approved by the FDA, all of the COVID vaccines were, and the others still are, experimental treatments for emergency use.
I made a decision to get vaccinated myself but if someone were to say “Drug trials normally take years in order to assess the long-term effects, whereas the long-term effects of COVID vaccines are necessarily unknowable at this time,” I couldn’t say they were wrong.
