Biologics

Prasad Has Covid YouTube Videos Pulled

CBER director Vinay Prasad demanded that YouTube videos in which he criticized the Covid-19 vaccines be removed. The videos were part of some 350 clips of doctors and commentators that were posted on the YouTube channel maintained by Jonathan Howard, a New York City neurologist and psychiatrist, according to The Guardian. The post says Howard’s channel has been deleted due to copyright infringement.

Howard said his goal with the channel was to preserve the comments of people like Prasad, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya during the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic. He said the clips often showed people exaggerating the risks of the Covid vaccines and minimizing the risks of Covid infection.

“These videos were nothing more than collections of what other doctors said during the pandemic, including doctors who are extremely influential and who are now the medical establishment,” Howard told the newspaper. “It’s important to remember [Prasad’s] past words in order to gauge his current and future credibility, and that was the mission of my YouTube channel, to record what these doctors [Prasad and others] said.”

Howard told The Guardian that he was not a victim and that the ordeal of having his channel deleted was nothing compared with the situation facing scientists and researchers whose funding is being cut by public health institutions.

While Howard said he made no money from his YouTube channel, with some of the videos being viewed only “dozens” of times, an FDA spokesperson told the newspaper, “All of Dr. Prasad’s videos, that were illegally taken and published by another party, remain available for all to watch on YouTube. Publishing someone else’s videos without modification or commentary is a clear copyright violation. The mission of Jonathan Howard was not medical transparency, but personal profit by grifting and stealing someone else’s intellectual property.”

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