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COVID response critic and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson was reinstated by Twitter Wednesday, after suing the social media company in the wake of his August 2021 banishment from the platform. Berenson and Twitter settled the lawsuit in late June, with most of the terms undisclosed. The tech giant was forced to eat a little crow, though, admitting that his “tweets should have not led to [his] (Berenson’s) suspension at that time.”
Shady’s back.
Tell a friend.
For the full story of my reinstatment, including @Twitter‘s acknowledgment of error, see my Substack.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 6, 2022
Berenson was a loud and early voice in expressing concerns about the mRNA COVID vaccines, and he used Twitter as his main tool to communicate with his 351,000 followers. Often pithy, even more often controversial, he was one of the trusted sources for the crowd that didn’t particularly believe in Chief Medical Advisor to the President, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Berenson often came into conflict with Twitter’s mysterious and censorious rules of conduct, and after his fifth “strike,” he was permanently banned. I guess it wasn’t so permanent after all.
It was this Tweet that finally did him in:
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.— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 6, 2022
That tweet had been deleted since his suspension last August, but he re-posted Wednesday morning. “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission,” Berenson writes. Those are obviously true statements, but at the time Joe Biden, Tony Fauci and Big Tech did not want you saying them.
Infamously dubbed “the Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” by The Atlantic, Berenson explains the ban on his Substack site, “Unreported Truths“:
To recap: last August, Twitter banned me after I got five strikes under its Covid-19 misinformation policy. Which meant I’d supposedly made “claims of fact” that were “demonstrably false or misleading” and “likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm” (that’s the policy, that’s what it takes to get a strike, look it up).
The problem with the Twitter ban is that every single thing Berenson posits in his “fifth strike” tweet is true. COVID vaccines don’t stop infection, don’t stop transmission, and they are basically “therapeutic[s] with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS.” Most of those claims are, by now, accepted facts. The only quibble one could take with him is his claim of a “terrible” side effect profile—some vax advocates might argue that the side effects aren’t so terrible. But that’s just his opinion, and it’s not misinformation.
It’s a beautiful day when Twitter has to admit that, too.
Berenson took a victory lap on another Substack post, dreaming up alternate tweets that he could have posted but didn’t. Many of them are hysterical; here’s a few:
Permanent suspensions aren’t what they used to be.
My “permanent suspension” lasted 10 months. About twice as long as “immunity.”
I love the smell of victory in the morning.
Does the potential Elon Musk ownership of Twitter have anything to do with the company settling? Berenson doesn’t think so:
But I want to say this: At least from my point of view, Elon Musk had nothing to do with what’s happening here. I emailed Musk briefly about the suit in April, after Twitter accepted his offer and before Judge William Alsup rejected Twitter’s motion to dismiss and allowed my lawsuit to proceed…
Musk didn’t email back.
Berenson is no stranger to censorship; he wrote a 2021 book called “Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives” which was inexplicably banned by Amazon (a decision they later reversed after outcry from Elon Musk and others). You don’t have to agree with the “Pandemic’s Wrongest Man,” you don’t have to buy his books or read his tweets. But he deserves to be allowed to speak.
The crush of the censorship efforts from government, Big Tech, and the mainstream media during these past few years has been scary for freedom-lovers to watch, but this win—even if it’s only a settlement—is a big step forward in the push to fight back.
