{"id":13344,"date":"2025-09-09T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=13344"},"modified":"2025-09-04T12:28:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T16:28:09","slug":"the-censorship-crybabies-are-now-the-censors-fdas-vinay-prasad-uses-copyright-claims-to-silence-critic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=13344","title":{"rendered":"The Censorship Crybabies Are Now The Censors: FDA\u2019s Vinay Prasad Uses Copyright Claims To Silence Critic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

from the the-censorship-government-complex<\/em> dept<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Wed, Sep 3rd 2025 09:20am – Mike Masnick<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s always fascinating to watch supposed \u201cfree speech warriors\u201d reveal their true colors the moment they get a tiny bit of power. We\u2019ve been covering the ongoing saga of various COVID contrarians who spent years falsely claiming they were \u201ccensored\u201d by the Biden administration, only to see the Supreme Court definitively reject those claims<\/a> in Murthy v. Missouri<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that some of these same people are running health agencies under Trump, we\u2019re getting to see what actual censorship looks like\u2014and surprise, surprise, it\u2019s coming from the very people who complained the loudest about being silenced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest example comes courtesy of Dr. Vinay Prasad, now the FDA\u2019s top vaccine regulator, who used copyright claims to shut down a YouTube channel run by Dr. Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been documenting and critiquing the statements of what he calls our \u201ccurrent Medical Establishment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howard\u2019s channel served an important function: documenting the public statements of people who are now in positions of significant power over American health policy. As Howard explains in a detailed blog post on Science-Based Medicine<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A core goal of my work has been to preserve the words of our current Medical Establishment. While accurately remembering the past is valuable in its own right, we need to remember their prior pronouncements to judge their current credibility, even if they don\u2019t want us to do that. A doctor who fluffed RFK Jr. or spread blatant disinformation about a deadly virus is unlikely to be trustworthy about anything.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To that end, I started a YouTube channel last year, which served as a repository of what our current Medical Establishment said. I had accumulated about 350 videos, almost all of which were short clips of famous doctors saying absurd things- that herd immunity had arrived in the spring of 2021 and that RFK Jr. was an honest broker about vaccines, for example. I appeared in just a handful of the videos, as a small face offering commentary in the corner, though I hadn\u2019t made a new video all year. I never promoted the channel and made no money from it.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The channel was small\u2014just 256 subscribers\u2014but the videos were primarily clips of public statements, interviews, and social media posts that Howard used to support his critiques and articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enter Prasad, who apparently couldn\u2019t stand having his own words preserved<\/a> for posterity. As The Guardian reported:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist in New York City, received an email from YouTube on Friday night, which stated that Vinay Prasad, who is the FDA\u2019s top vaccine regulator, had demanded the removal of six videos of himself from Howard\u2019s YouTube channel.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howard\u2019s entire channel has now been deleted by YouTube, which cited copyright infringement.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Here\u2019s where the hypocrisy becomes unmistakable. This is the same Vinay Prasad who has spent years positioning himself as a victim of censorship\u2014someone who built his brand on being a \u201cfree speech\u201d advocate. Howard notes with some irony how he won\u2019t do all the \u201cI am being censored!\u201d nonsense that Prasad and his now colleague as a government health official, Jay Bhattacharya, have spent years doing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To be clear, the loss of my YouTube channel is a trivial thing, and I promise not to make it the center of my identify. I won\u2019t make a Supreme Court case<\/a> out of it or record lengthy videos about it- Prasad\u2019s Lecture is Cancelled from ACCP Conference b\/c Online Haters<\/a>. I won\u2019t sit down for self-pitying interviews with Bari Weiss<\/a>, the Wall Street Journal<\/a>, and Reason Magazine<\/a>. I\u2019ve been censored before<\/a>, and I am not dramatic about such things. After all, my YouTube channel had 256 subscribers and its videos were typically seen by dozens of people, DOZENS<\/strong><\/a>! Its loss is a speck of dust compared to what RFK Jr. is destroying, and on one level, it both really funny and pathetic that Dr. Prasad would care so much about it.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Howard also notes that Prasad seems to have zero problem with anti-vaxxers using the very same videos of Prasad, showing how this is clearly selective enforcement (i.e., a government official engaging in viewpoint discrimination to shut down Howard\u2019s attempt to call out Prasad\u2019s nonsense):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From his podcast Gmail account, Dr. Prasad filed a formal complaint that video clips he had posted to Twitter had been uploaded to YouTube. YouTube agreed and killed my channel. Dr. Prasad was not bothered by someone sharing his videos on principle. For years, he\u2019s been happy to let anti-vaxx disinformation accounts share countless clips of his vulgar revenge fantasies.<\/em> Dr. Prasad only objected when I, someone who exposed his disinformation, sought to preserve and share these exact same videos.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is textbook censorial behavior disguised as copyright enforcement. Copyright has long been the tool of choice for those looking to silence critics, and this appears to be a classic example. Howard\u2019s use of these clips\u2014for commentary, criticism, and documentation\u2014would almost certainly qualify as fair use under copyright law. As Howard points out, he\u2019s now reuploading videos with his own commentary included, which makes the fair use case even stronger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the copyright angle is really beside the point here. The real story is the breathtaking hypocrisy of someone who built his brand on being a \u201cfree speech\u201d advocate suddenly using legal threats to silence a critic the moment he gets into government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This hypocrisy extends throughout the Trump health apparatus. As I detailed last year<\/a>, Jay Bhattacharya\u2014now head of the NIH\u2014spent years falsely claiming he was \u201ccensored\u201d by social media platforms, when the reality was that his content was simply being fact-checked or receiving less algorithmic promotion. Meanwhile, RFK Jr., now Secretary of Health and Human Services, has filed numerous (failed) lawsuits<\/a> making similarly bogus censorship claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s almost as if all these \u201chealth\u201d professionals who spent years falsely claiming they were censored because they received some (well deserved) pushback and criticism for their highly questionable arguments, were really just itching to censor their critics all along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howard captures this perfectly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s no secret that the administration in which Dr. Prasad proudly serves-<\/em> Vinay was not anti-Trump<\/em><\/a>\u2013 is<\/em> censoring scientists<\/em><\/a> and dissident voices. The termination of my channel is a small part of that process, and so it\u2019s OK to be clear about what seems to have happened here.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The pattern is clear: these individuals spent the Biden administration crying about imaginary censorship while building their brands as free speech martyrs. Now that they\u2019re in power, they\u2019re showing us what actual censorship looks like\u2014using copyright claims, legal threats, and government pressure to silence critics and preserve their own narratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s worth noting that Howard isn\u2019t giving up. As he explains:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unlike Dr. Prasad, I have no problem with anyone sharing my work. Feel free! Much of it merely collects and curates what Dr. Prasad said the past 5 years, including in the erased videos. None of this is lost, and I think it\u2019s very important that we don\u2019t forget it. And even though my YouTube channel (RIP, 2024-2025) was assassinated by my own government, there are many ways to remind the world of what he said. I\u2019ve already created<\/em> another YouTube channel<\/em><\/a>, and this time every video will come with my commentary. It will be much better than the one that got erased, and hopefully it will be more widely viewed.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is exactly the right response. When would-be censors try to use copyright as a cudgel, the answer isn\u2019t to be silenced\u2014it\u2019s to make the fair use case even stronger by adding more commentary and criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The broader lesson here is one we\u2019ve seen repeatedly: the loudest voices falsely complaining about \u201ccensorship\u201d are often the first to engage in actual censorship when given the opportunity. These COVID contrarians built their entire brands on being silenced martyrs, but the moment they gained real power, they immediately started trying to silence their critics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howard puts it best:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Americans do not need our government\u2019s permission to remember their words and inform the world about what our public officials said. I refuse to let Dr. Prasad be silenced or censored. He should extend me the same courtesy. He is a powerful government official. I am just a private citizen seeking to hold my government accountable.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the real issue here: a government official using legal threats to try to silence a private citizen who is documenting his public statements. It\u2019s exactly the kind of behavior that Prasad and his colleagues claimed to oppose when it was happening to them (even though it wasn\u2019t actually happening to them).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that this is being done under the guise of copyright law doesn\u2019t make it any less censorial\u2014it just makes it more cowardly. At least when governments engage in direct censorship, they\u2019re being honest about what they\u2019re doing. Using copyright claims to silence critics is censorship with a fig leaf, and it\u2019s particularly galling when it comes from people who built their reputations complaining about being censored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hypocrisy here is undeniable. These are the same people who spent years claiming that any fact-checking or algorithmic demotion was \u201ccensorship,\u201d now using actual legal threats to silence critics. They demanded that social media platforms give them unlimited reach and immunity from criticism, while simultaneously working to eliminate criticism of their own statements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howard\u2019s documentation project is more important than ever, precisely because people like Prasad are now in positions of significant power over American health policy. The public has a right to know what these officials said before they gained power, and they have a right to hold them accountable for those statements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that Prasad is trying to memory-hole his own public statements should tell us everything we need to know about how confident he is in defending them. If your public statements can\u2019t withstand scrutiny, perhaps the problem isn\u2019t with the people scrutinizing them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the the-censorship-government-complex dept Wed, Sep 3rd 2025 09:20am – Mike Masnick It\u2019s always fascinating to watch supposed \u201cfree speech warriors\u201d reveal their true colors the moment they get a tiny bit of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1332,1333,445],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-censorship","category-free-speech","category-policies-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13355,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13344\/revisions\/13355"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}