Last week, a top official with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) apparently filed a bogus copyright claim to get a critic's YouTube account taken down. This is an inappropriate act of censorship that, not long ago, conservatives would rightly have stood against.
"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," The Guardian reported this week. "Howard's entire channel has now been deleted by YouTube, which cited copyright infringement."
On his channel, Howard hosted videos of public health officials—including Prasad, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya—making statements during the COVID-19 pandemic that turned out to be untrue or overly myopic. "I had accumulated about 350 videos, almost all of which were short clips of famous doctors saying absurd things," Howard wrote in a blog post, "that herd immunity had arrived in the spring of 2021 and that RFK Jr. was an honest broker about vaccines, for example." Howard is also critical of Prasad's stance on vaccines, which Prasad now has the authority to regulate.
According to an email Howard posted, YouTube "terminated" his channel after "multiple copyright strikes" against his videos, and the "removal request" came from Prasad.
"Publishing someone else's videos without modification or commentary is a clear copyright violation," an FDA spokesperson told The Guardian. "The mission of Johnathan Howard was not medical transparency, but personal profit by grifting and stealing someone else's intellectual property."
"My YouTube channel had 256 subscribers and its videos were typically seen by dozens of people," Howard wrote. "I never promoted the channel and made no money from it." Besides, U.S. law allows for fair use of copyrighted material, which means someone can use protected content for purposes such as "
Howard is the author of the book We Want Them Infected, which criticized doctors and public health officials who advocated a herd immunity strategy for dealing with COVID-19. Howard says such warnings fed into anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. His YouTube channel collected videos of people who are now in charge of public health institutions, making what he feels were irresponsible claims during the pandemic.
But whether you agree with Howard or not, it is wrong and hypocritical for Prasad to silence his critics in this way.
Scientific determinations result from numerous hypotheses, many of which turn out to be false. This was especially true in the case of COVID-19, a novel virus that grew into a pandemic as the scientific community scrambled to respond. And yet all too often, public health institutions were treated as infallible, rather than as bureaucracies staffed by humans capable of bias or error. Anyone skeptical of public health measures was admonished to "trust the science." Vaccines were developed and distributed in record time, saving untold millions of lives, but the scientific community as a whole suffered a major blow to its reputation.
One person who understood this at the time was Prasad. "During the pandemic major universities held ~0 debates on lockdowns, prolonged school closure, masking toddlers, visitor restrictions, and perpetual hospital masking," Prasad wrote on Substack in February 2023. "It's one thing to act in times of uncertainty. It is another thing to stifle dissent and dialog."
And yet that seems to be exactly what Prasad is doing now by getting Howard's YouTube channel shut down.
It's akin to jawboning, when public officials pressure social media companies to police certain content on their platforms. Prasad went about it through a copyright claim, but it's still an example of a public official shutting down First Amendment–protected speech they find unfavorable or embarrassing.
Republican state attorneys general sued Facebook and Twitter in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming the social media companies had banned certain users at the behest of President Joe Biden's administration. Now, conservatives have apparently come around on the idea of censoring one's political enemies online.
"No government officials can memory-hole their own speech in an attempt to hide their past statements from the public. Doing it through improper copyright complaints is no less censorship than a direct government order," Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in a statement. "YouTube must reverse its termination of Howard's channel and make clear that it will not allow government officials to use copyright complaints to erase or revise history."
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