from the the-censorship-government-complex dept
It’s always fascinating to watch supposed “free speech warriors” reveal their true colors the moment they get a tiny bit of power. We’ve been covering the ongoing saga of various COVID contrarians who spent years falsely claiming they were “censored” by the Biden administration, only to see the Supreme Court definitively reject those claims in Murthy v. Missouri.
Now that some of these same people are running health agencies under Trump, we’re getting to see what actual censorship looks like—and surprise, surprise, it’s coming from the very people who complained the loudest about being silenced.
The latest example comes courtesy of Dr. Vinay Prasad, now the FDA’s 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 “current Medical Establishment.”
Howard’s 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 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’t 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.
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’t made a new video all year. I never promoted the channel and made no money from it.
The channel was small—just 256 subscribers—but the videos were primarily clips of public statements, interviews, and social media posts that Howard used to support his critiques and articles.
Enter Prasad, who apparently couldn’t stand having his own words preserved for posterity. As The Guardian reported:
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’s top vaccine regulator, had demanded the removal of six videos of himself from Howard’s YouTube channel.
Howard’s entire channel has now been deleted by YouTube, which cited copyright infringement.
Here’s where the hypocrisy becomes unmistakable. This is the same Vinay Prasad who has spent years positioning himself as a victim of censorship—someone who built his brand on being a “free speech” advocate. Howard notes with some irony how he won’t do all the “I am being censored!” nonsense that Prasad and his now colleague as a government health official, Jay Bhattacharya, have spent years doing:
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’t make a Supreme Court case out of it or record lengthy videos about it- Prasad’s Lecture is Cancelled from ACCP Conference b/c Online Haters. I won’t sit down for self-pitying interviews with Bari Weiss, the Wall Street Journal, and Reason Magazine. I’ve been censored before, 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! 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.
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’s attempt to call out Prasad’s nonsense):
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’s been happy to let anti-vaxx disinformation accounts share countless clips of his vulgar revenge fantasies. Dr. Prasad only objected when I, someone who exposed his disinformation, sought to preserve and share these exact same videos.
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’s use of these clips—for commentary, criticism, and documentation—would almost certainly qualify as fair use under copyright law. As Howard points out, he’s now reuploading videos with his own commentary included, which makes the fair use case even stronger.
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 “free speech” advocate suddenly using legal threats to silence a critic the moment he gets into government.
This hypocrisy extends throughout the Trump health apparatus. As I detailed last year, Jay Bhattacharya—now head of the NIH—spent years falsely claiming he was “censored” 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 making similarly bogus censorship claims.
It’s almost as if all these “health” 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.
Howard captures this perfectly:
It’s no secret that the administration in which Dr. Prasad proudly serves- Vinay was not anti-Trump– is censoring scientists and dissident voices. The termination of my channel is a small part of that process, and so it’s OK to be clear about what seems to have happened here.
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’re in power, they’re showing us what actual censorship looks like—using copyright claims, legal threats, and government pressure to silence critics and preserve their own narratives.
It’s worth noting that Howard isn’t giving up. As he explains:
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’s very important that we don’t 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’ve already created another YouTube channel, 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.
This is exactly the right response. When would-be censors try to use copyright as a cudgel, the answer isn’t to be silenced—it’s to make the fair use case even stronger by adding more commentary and criticism.
The broader lesson here is one we’ve seen repeatedly: the loudest voices falsely complaining about “censorship” 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.
Howard puts it best:
Americans do not need our government’s 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.
That’s the real issue here: a government official using legal threats to try to silence a private citizen who is documenting his public statements. It’s exactly the kind of behavior that Prasad and his colleagues claimed to oppose when it was happening to them (even though it wasn’t actually happening to them).
The fact that this is being done under the guise of copyright law doesn’t make it any less censorial—it just makes it more cowardly. At least when governments engage in direct censorship, they’re being honest about what they’re doing. Using copyright claims to silence critics is censorship with a fig leaf, and it’s particularly galling when it comes from people who built their reputations complaining about being censored.
The hypocrisy here is undeniable. These are the same people who spent years claiming that any fact-checking or algorithmic demotion was “censorship,” 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.
Howard’s 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.
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’t withstand scrutiny, perhaps the problem isn’t with the people scrutinizing them.
Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, fda, jay bhattacharya, jonathan howard, transparency, vinay prasad
Companies: youtube
