YouTube took down a video from an epidemiologist who opposed stay-at-home orders.
Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, the former head of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design at Rockefeller University, claims to be the latest to be punished by YouTube’s intensified community standards amid the coronavirus, saying the company removed his video, which had accumulated more than 1.3 million views.
According to the New York Post, the now-deleted video showed Wittkowski advocating for herd immunity as the proper approach for countering the coronavirus pandemic. “With 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’t even have recognized that they were infected,” he reportedly said.
Wittkowski said YouTube did not provide an explanation as to why his video was taken down and that he was surprised that it violated the company’s community standards.
“I was just explaining what we had,” he told the New York Post. “They don’t tell you. They just say it violates our community standards. There’s no explanation for what those standards are or what standards it violated.”
After the publication of this article, YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi confirmed the video’s removal in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“We quickly remove flagged content that violates our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance. We are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time,” Choi said.
YouTube CEO told CNN that advocating for vitamins as a cure for COVID-19 or “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy and so removal is another really important part of our policy.”
In mid-April, Rockefeller University also released a statement to clarify it doesn’t support Wittkowski’s views, nor has he ever been given the title professor at the institution.
“The opinions that have been expressed by Knut Wittkowski, discouraging social distancing in order to hasten the development of herd immunity to the novel coronavirus, do not represent the views of The Rockefeller University, its leadership, or its faculty,” the statement reads. “Wittkowski was previously employed by Rockefeller as a biostatistician. He has never held the title of professor at Rockefeller.”
Nearly 4.6 million people have tested positive for the coronavirus globally. Of those, more than 310,000 have died from it, and more than 1.6 million have recovered.
The United States has seen at least 1.4 million confirmed cases, with more than 88,000 deaths and nearly 251,000 reported recoveries. More than 10.7 million people have been tested for the virus nationwide, according to the latest reading of the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
