(USA Features) GOP Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson said Friday he was booted from YouTube after sharing videos of himself during a Senate hearing in which he touted information regarding non-traditional treatments for COVID-19 including with medications ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
“We removed the video in accordance with our COVID-19 medical misinformation policies, which don’t allow content that encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus,” a platform spokesperson told .
Johnson’s suspension is for one week, reports noted.
The Wisconsin Republican issued a statement condemning YouTube and blasting “big tech” “COVID censorship” in general.
“YouTube’s ongoing COVID censorship proves they have accumulated too much unaccountable power,” he said.
“Big Tech and mainstream media believe they are smarter than medical doctors who have devoted their lives to science and use their skills to save lives. They have decided there is only one medical viewpoint allowed and it is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies,” Johnson added.
“How many lives will be lost as a result? How many lives could have been saved with a free exchange of medical ideas? Government-sanctioned censorship of ideas and speech should concern us all,” he continued.
Not all big tech platforms are moving to censor new information about the pandemic-causing virus. Facebook, for instance, it would not throttle or ban content regarding theories that COVID-19 may have originated in a Chinese virology laboratory in Wuhan and accidentally escaped.
The video Johnson posted came from a November Senate hearing. But a study published by medRxiv this week found that COVID-19 patients on ventilators treated with a combination of antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and zinc had a survival rate of up to 200 times greater than those not similarly treated.
“By using causal analysis and considering of weight-adjusted cumulative dose, we prove the combined therapy, >3 g HCQ andzinc > 1g AZM greatly increases survival in Covid patients on IMV and that HCQ cumulative dose > 80 mg/kg works substantially better. These data do not yet apply to hospitalized patients not on IMV,” researchers wrote.
“Since those with higher doses of HCQ had higher doses of AZM, we cannot solely attribute the causal effect to HCQ/AZM combination therapy. However, it is likely AZM [zinc] does contribute significantly to this increase in survival rate. Since higher dose HCQ/AZM therapy improves survival by nearly 200% in this population, the safety data are moot,” it adds.
“We found that when the cumulative doses of two drugs, HCQ and AZM, were above a certain level, patients had a survival rate 2.9 times the other patients,” the study, conducted by Saint Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey on 255 patients, concludes.
In March 2020, then-President Donald Trump said he was prophylactically taking hydroxychloroquine, ultimately against the advice of his health experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci.