Former NYT journo sues Twitter over permanent ban after he dared to question COVID vaccine

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Independent journalist Alex Berenson has officially sued Twitter for violating his First Amendment right to free speech after the platform banned him permanently for questioning the effectiveness of COVID vaccinations.

The federal lawsuit was filed on Monday in the US District Court for Northern California, according to the Daily Mail. Berenson is seeking reinstatement to the social media platform and unspecified monetary damages in connection to his permanent ban last August.

Berenson was a journalist with The New York Times until 2010. He has been a vocal skeptic of many pandemic policies and has been unabashed in airing his opinions. Twitter banned him over a tweet that stated COVID vaccines do not prevent an individual from contracting the virus or transmitting it to someone else.

“Mr. Berenson’s claim that the COVID-19 vaccines do not ‘stop infection’ or ‘transmission’ of COVID-19 was true at the time and is true now,” his attorneys asserted in the 70-page complaint.

“It is undisputed that vaccinated persons can contract and spread COVID-19,” the lawsuit contends. It also points out that Dr. Anthony Fauci himself has made that claim in published interviews.

Berenson’s lawyers are also arguing that Twitter does not offer its own definition of the word “vaccine” while stating that Berenson’s claim about the vaccines being therapeutic drugs instead of vaccines was justified because they are not 100 percent effective at preventing infections.

The premise of the lawsuit is not whether Berenson is correct concerning the efficacy of vaccines or the transmissibility of the virus. His complaint is asserting that Twitter is a “common carrier,” that is required under California and federal law to provide service to everyone.

“Twitter’s role in public debate in the twenty-first century resembles that of the telegraph in the nineteenth,” the lawsuit posits.

Berenson’s lawyers are also arguing that he has “a uniquely viable claim that Twitter acted on behalf of the federal government in censoring and barring him from its platform.”

The claim has to do with the timing of government officials including President Biden who called for a crackdown on pandemic misinformation on social media. Berenson believes that Twitter responded to that call and proceeded to ban him as a result of it.

The lawsuit is claiming that Berenson’s First Amendment rights were violated. False advertising, violation of California common carrier law, and other complaints are included in the suit as well.

Berenson is now publishing over at Substack, a space that is being utilized by many authors who have been banned from other platforms. He has also written and released a bestselling book titled, “Pandemia.”

“There’s just a ton we don’t know but what we do know is that the public health authorities lie, they lied, and they were wrong,” Berenson notes in his book. “They overpromised, they were caught short by what happened in, you know, in the summer in Israel and what is happening everywhere else. And so they need to admit that they have essentially no credibility left with a lot of the population and the first step to getting that back is admitting that they didn’t tell the truth or that they were wrong.”

The tweet that got Berenson banned stated, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS.”

Berenson has been writing and speaking out against mask and vaccine mandates since last year. He wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that asserted the pandemic had caused “a new age of censorship and suppression.”

“Information has never been more plentiful or easier to distribute. Yet we are sliding into a new age of censorship and suppression, encouraged by technology giants and traditional media companies,” Berenson wrote in his piece.

“As someone who’s been falsely characterized as a coronavirus ‘denier,’ I have seen this crisis firsthand,” he commented.

During his stint at The New York Times, Berenson reported on the pharmaceutical industry and financial crime. He left the media outlet to pursue a career as a full-time author and novelist.

The Yale-educated author was branded “the pandemic’s wrongest man” by The Atlantic over his predictions concerning the virus.

Berenson originally predicted that the US would not surpass 500,000 deaths due to the coronavirus. Authorities now claim we have blown past 800,000, however, many Americans wonder if those numbers are correct, positing they include all manner of deaths that are not truly COVID-related.

The author is hugely popular and has a large following with more than 340,000 followers prior to his Twitter ban.

“Remember, folks – Don’t take the law into your own hands, you take ‘em to court!'” Berenson proclaimed on Substack.

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