So yeah this really happened.
The Wrap reports:
YouTube has deleted a video in which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a handful of medical experts questioned the effectiveness of having children wear masks to stop the spread of COVID-19.
The video, which was removed on Wednesday, was of a recent roundtable discussion DeSantis moderated on the global response to the pandemic. DeSantis was joined by Oxford epidemiologist Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Harvard professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University. The clip was posted by the American Institute for Economic Research, and a transcript of the discussion can be found on the group's website by clicking here.
A YouTube rep confirmed to TheWrap on Thursday the video was removed due to multiple instances where the doctors said children didn't need to wear masks. This position, a YouTube rep said, violated the Google-owned video site's "COVID-19 medical misinformation" policies.
Notice that in the video it was medical experts questioning whether or not children needed to wear masks to slow the spread of Rona. Specifically, "Oxford epidemiologist Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Harvard professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University."
Google says nope, those are the wrong kind of medical experts. Those ones don't count. Only our kind of medical experts, thank you very much.
According to the Wrap, these exchanges caused YouTube to break out the banhammer:
- DeSantis at one point in the video asked if it was necessary for kids to wear masks in school. Dr. Kulldorff in response said "children should not wear face masks, no. They don't need it for their own protection and they don't need it for protecting other people, either."
- Dr. Bhattacharya said it is "developmentally inappropriate" for children to wear masks and that it "just doesn't help on the disease spread." He added: "I think it's absolutely not the right thing to do… if we went back a year, a lot of experts would say that wearing masks for the general public is not evidence-based."
- Dr. Atlas later said "there's no scientific rationale or logic to have children wear masks in schools."
