By R. Clinton Ohlers
Twitter suspended the account of Free Press Media Group contributing editor and analyst R. Clinton Ohlers hours after his article, "Evidence of hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness was hiding in plain sight", was published by <span style="color: #333399;"><strong>WorldTribune</strong></span>.com.
The suspension came without warning or notification. All followers were removed. For the time being, it appears permanent.
The offending piece is an in-depth analysis of a pivotal study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and the events in New York that led up to it.
Related: Effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine was hiding in plain sight, September 21, 2020
The JAMA study concluded that hydroxychloroquine imparted no benefit to hospitalized patients. However, the study did so by including patients so severely ill when they received the drug that it could be expected to have no effect at all. The study’s design was similar to assessing whether automotive airbags could save lives by including a high percentage of cases in which airbags were deployed only after a fatal collision had already occurred.
When the data was re-analyzed, hydroxychloroquine demonstrated dramatic life-saving effects. When the “unsuitable” cases, as the JAMA study’s authors referred to them, were transferred out of the hydroxychloroquine groups and into the no-drug group, patient survival improved by as much as 77%.
These results affirm the findings of large studies recently undertaken in Spain, Belgium, and in the U.S. at the Henry Ford Health Systems.
Thousands of American lives could have been saved by early use of the safe-to-use hydroxychloroquine in treating coronavirus, but the Food and Drug Administration and hero of the leftist media Dr. Anthony Fauci have allowed politics to “overrule science,” a Yale epidemiologist said.
“The evidence is overwhelming,” on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating covid, Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, said on the Aug. 23 broadcast of “Life, Liberty & Levin” on Fox News.
In an interview with Ohlers on Thursday on Episode 112 of the WashingtonExposé.com podcast about the Twitter "suspension" and the offending article, host Bill Wilson characterized the situation pointedly:
"Think about this. He finds data in I think the single, maybe the second, most authoritative journal in the world that proves the efficacy of this drug, HCQ, in treating the virus ... And in classic Soviet style as he starts to write about this and get it out into the public, Twitter bans him ... They do the Soviet bit of essentially making him a non-person. He's gone."
Co-hosts Carter Clews and Larry Ward called it "fascism." Clews added, "He's gone. They banned him for trying to tell the truth ... for trying to save lives."
Going further, Wilson commented: "If you believe things happen for a reason, I think the banning is a good thing in the sense that it now draws attention to the lengths to which the structure will go to suppress the truth, continue to support the hacks at the WHO, and I think frankly it should now become reason for Senate hearings into the suppression of information about HCQ, its efficacy, and start to raise some questions about why this has been suppressed."
The cause of the suspension appears to be umbrage to these findings taken by Twitter user “French Resister” @aenbaoui. French Resister protested the article from JAMA, one of the top two medical journals in the United States and probably within the top three in the world, by saying it “IS NOT RÉFÉRENCE IN HEALTH FIELD.”
French Resister also objected to use of data from Johns Hopkins University cited by George Washington University epidemiologist Dr. Steven Hatfill. These concerned cases in Switzerland and appeared in The Federalist. These he called “misleading,” and he warned “promoting fake news is Against twitter policy.”
At no point in the exchange did French Resister make any objection to any data or analysis on which the article's conclusions were based. These conclusions were formed with input from a quantum physicist, pathologist, and two MDs.
Dr. Ohlers closed the conversation with this:
Within one to two hours of that conversation @rcohlers was suspended.
A professor at the University of Hong Kong commented via WhatsApp:
“[The article] was sound analysis, well presented. How can Twitter allow stories about flat earth and alien abduction, but block what you wrote? With the best will in the world, your country is broken."
In a dispute over misinformation, Twitter’s censors appear to have preferred the opinion of a single individual in France, so uninformed as to think the JAMA is not relevant in the medical world, instead of reasoned analysis by a PhD informed by the work of multiple epidemiologists and medical researchers publishing major studies on hydroxychloroquine around the world.
In doing so they encroached, if not violated, rights protected by the First Amendment, and they censored potentially life-saving work at a time when U.S. governors are increasingly facing the decision of whether to lift statewide bans on hydroxychloroquine.
R. Clinton Ohlers can now be followed on Parler at @Rcohlers.
R. Clinton Ohlers, PhD is a historian of science and religion and a contributing editor for the FreePressMediaGroup. Previously, he held the position of Research Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His book, The Birth of the Conflict Between Science and Religion, is scheduled to appear in 2021. He received his PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania.
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