Senior advocate and activist Prashant Bhushan’s tweet on Coronavirus vaccines was flagged as "misleading" by Twitter on Monday. Bushan had recently tweeted about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines which have drawn widespread criticism.
Mr Bhushan on Monday morning posted a news article about a case where a 45-year-old woman died 10 days after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, he said, "irresponsible to promote universal vaccination of experimental and untested vaccines especially to young and Covid recovered".
In one of his tweets, he wrote: "The healthy young have hardly any chance of serious effects or dying due to covid. They have a higher chance of dying due to vaccines. The covid recovered have much better natural immunity than the vaccine gives them. Vaccines may even compromise their acquired natural immunity."
Reacting to Bhushan’s remarks, Dr NK Arora, Chairman of the Government of India's Covid working group said that Bhushan’s comments do not do good at a time when the government is trying its best to educate people on vaccine hesitancy, said Dr Arora.
A disclaimer has been added to Prashant Bhushan’s Tweet by Twitter saying, "This Tweet is misleading. Find out why health officials consider COVID-19 vaccines safe for most people." This also prevents any other Twitter user from sharing the tweet unless it has been quoted.
Mr Bhushan then posted a four-page deeper dive summarising his views after his remarks triggered outrage on Twitter.
"I have been attacked by many for tweeting about my views on Covid vaccines. The piece below summarises my Vaccine scepticism & the reasons for this,” he said.
He further went on to say: "Apart from the vaccines being untested & having serious adverse effects, I am shocked by attempts to censor such contrarian views.”
Twitter’s moves come weeks after another similar high-profile account’s tweets by BJP leaders like Sambit Patra was labelled as "manipulated". Patra in his tweet had accused Congress of preparing and sharing a toolkit to defame the government over his Covid lapses.
Twitter has been recently policing content on its platform since the violent attack on the US Capitol by Donald Trump supporters in January this year. It even banned the former president from a social networking site.
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Meanwhile, the tech firm is engaged in a bitter spat with the BJP-led government at the centre over several issues like taking down the tweets that support farmers' protest, discrediting posts by leaders of the BJP and more recently on the new IT rules.