Dr. Simone Gold, a board-certified emergency physician and the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, has responded to Twitter’s removal of her tweet about treatments for COVID-19 and locking her out of her account.
In her response, Dr. Gold – who also graduated from Stanford Law School after completing her medical degree – called out her temporary Twitter ban, calling the action “another classic case of tech censorship against anyone who speaks out against the media narrative.”
Dr. Gold continued:
The facts are on my side. I’ve spent half my life studying diseases and made my career on treating them. I think I know what I’m talking about. Either Twitter is afraid of free-thinking or they have a serious problem with a successful woman speaking her mind. Either way, they should leave medical advice to medical professionals.
Twitter locked my account for 12 hours & forced me to delete a tweet pertaining to treatment options for COVID-19.
In case this happens again, please make sure to follow me on my other social media:https://t.co/3yOTGpbnc0https://t.co/NVVNRXk31Bhttps://t.co/11I4DwgYeC pic.twitter.com/o7hgPYtgp6
— Dr. Simone Gold (@drsimonegold) August 8, 2020
On August 5, Dr. Gold tweeted a now-removed description of hydroxychloroquine and its use in treating COVID-19. However, Twitter said the post violated its policy “on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”
Twitter claimed that Dr. Gold’s post “may pose a risk to people’s health, including content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.”
As a result, Twitter locked Dr. Gold’s account for 12 hours, restricting her from tweeting or replying to tweets. This ban also forced Dr. Gold to delete the post in question.
This is despite 53 studies showing that hydroxychloroquine has positive effects in treating COVID-19 when used early in conjunction with zinc and an antibiotic such as azithromycin or doxycycline.
Other studies debunking the drug were found to either have faulty premises or were falsified and later retracted.
Dr. Gold was fired from positions as an emergency doctor at some Los Angeles area hospitals earlier this month for appearing in a viral video promoting hydroxychloroquine.
The video was removed from most social media outlets, including Facebook, for its positive discussion of the drug.
Dr. Gold isn’t the only medical professional who thinks hydroxychloroquine combined with zinc and antibiotics should be seriously considered as a treatment for COVID-19.
Dr. Harvey A. Risch, a professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek in which he said that when hydroxychloroquine is “given very early in the course of illness, before the virus has had time to multiply beyond control, it has shown to be highly effective, especially when given in combination with the antibiotics azithromycin or doxycycline and the nutritional supplement zinc.”
Dr. Risch’s research has shown that the hydroxychloroquine/zinc/azithromycin combination can have “significant major outpatient treatment efficacy” when used early on.
This study was published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Epidemiology.
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Sam Medley is a journalist at the Tennessee Star and Star News Network. You can follow Sam on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Simone Gold” by Simone Gold.
