How I Was Canceled by MeetUp.com

This is my story of getting censored by Meetup.com for being a Covid vaccine questioner in early 2022.

When it happened I was bewildered, and not knowing where to turn, did nothing. Thus my manifesto was erased from the world’s view, as the censors intended.

Now I have gotten to know Brownstone Institute and find a flock of folks who think somewhat like me. So for the sake of the historical record, let me tell you what happened.

At the end of 2021, I like many others was feeling isolated and frustrated with the Covid lockdowns still widely in force. But I got a bright an idea. Isn’t that what Meetup.com is for? To make new friends?!

So I created a Meetup group called “Covid Contrarians” in New York City. The idea was just to meet other people like me, who thought our governments were overreacting to the Covid situation. My big plan was no more than, get together and schmooze over coffee or a beer. 

The group lasted a few weeks before Meetup declared that it was spreading misinformation, and erased it from the website.

Fortunately for sake of history, Internet Archive captured the group’s “About” page before it got deep-sixed. You can see it, as it was during its brief existence, by searching on archive.org for meetup.com/covid-contrarians. (It shows the organizer as “Don”, my nickname.)

But for your convenience, below I have copied the full text of the statement I wrote for the group’s home page.

Was this misinformation, deserving of censorship? Decide for yourself.

(Copied from Covid Contrarians home page on Meetup.com, Jan. 2022)

It’s lonely being a Covid contrarian. We who mistrust the vaccines or oppose the lockdowns are treated as pariahs by employers, local governments, and even by friends and family. Join our group to find new friends who see the world as you do…

We don’t doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is a real pathogen and threat to the lives of some people. We do disagree with how that threat is being managed and reported by media, governments, and health authorities worldwide…

This group is for everyone who doesn’t trust your government’s policies and pronouncements about Covid, and who wants to discuss these views, and related ideas, with like-minded folks…

In the group’s early days we may do zoom-type meetings, but when we have a critical mass, we intend to meet in-person. Although we are starting in New York City, we invite members from anywhere. If you want to host a gathering in your city, we will be happy to post your local events on our calendar.

There are many reasons to be a Covid contrarian. We invite you to join the group if you agree with some or most of the complaints listed below.

If you think most or all of what appears on this page is wrong, please just go away. You probably are not going to change our minds, and vice-versa. You believe what your government tells you about Covid. We trust what critics and dissenters say. No amount of citing statistics (which can be misleading) or opinions by esteemed authorities (who are fallible), on either side of this question, is going to change the mindset of either of us. Perhaps only in the course of history, will it become clear who was right.

OUR COMPLAINTS

We protest that the worldwide lockdowns have caused harm worse than the disease, in that tens of millions of poor people (who can’t work from home) were forced into unemployment, resulting in millions more malnourished children around the world. Even children who still have enough to eat, have lost a year or two of schooling, the results of which will reverberate probably beyond our lifetimes. All this so that the prosperous classes in every country can attempt to protect themselves from coronavirus, even though these same people neglect their own health every day in every other way — leading them almost all to acquire self-inflicted ailments such as cardio-vascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and auto-immune conditions, which become the co-morbidities that make this coronavirus deadly especially to the elderly. So in effect, we sacrifice the welfare of poor and underfed children worldwide, to safeguard the lives of overfed bureaucrats and their middle-class families and friends, who are in the minority of the population that can work from home.

We protest that those same bureaucrats ignored the recommendations of the Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020. This proposed a way to protect the most vulnerable in our societies while allowing the rest of us to get back to work and to school. As this is written in January 2022, Great Barrington continues to be applicable even with widespread use of Covid vaccines.

We protest how governments disregard important findings in the fields of immunology, nutrition, and lifestyle medicine, that teach us how to strengthen the body’s immune response against pathogens including coronaviruses. In the past decade especially, strong scientific evidence has emerged about ways the immune system may be reinforced by techniques such as cultivating a diverse microbiome, using supplemental zinc and vitamin D, and other promising approaches. Of all the billions and trillions of dollars spent on lockdown relief, Covid testing, and vaccine development, our governments spent none investigating treatments and prevention strategies that take advantage of the knowledge mentioned above. We protest that our governments don’t “follow the science”!

We protest that, as many or most Covid infections are mild or asymptomatic: Why don’t we research what causes those individuals to be unharmed by the virus? Is it genetic? Is it perhaps the presence or absence of some cofactor? Why don’t we have answers to this? Because our governments chose to rely only on the narrow discipline of vaccinology, which may have benefits, but whose risks they downplay through willful ignorance.

We protest that in the USA, hospitals receive financial incentives from the federal government to report Covid cases or deaths. This leads them naturally to label as Covid any case where it is only incidental or even unconfirmed. The result is inflated Covid hospitalization and mortality statistics, that the government uses to scare citizens into following its questionable dictates.

We protest that government health agencies are run by a revolving-door cadre of pharmaceutical industry executives. This includes the American FDA and CDC, as well as the World Health Organization. These agencies also to a large extent have their budgets paid by the pharma industry as well. Because of this institutional whoredom, reasonable regulatory policies or recommendations never see the light of day — or are actively suppressed — because they don’t earn billions for a drug company.

We protest reliance on PCR testing for identifying so-called Covid cases. Using more than 25 PCR amplifications produces a large proportion of false positives. By calling for 35-40 amplifications, the CDC and other agencies intentionally produce inflated case counts of asymptomatic people, exacerbating public anxiety. This concentrates more power in the hands of lockdown tsars and helps justify funneling endless billions to the pharma industry.

We protest that major news media reflexively parrot the government line about Covid. In the USA, this can be understood in light of the pharmaceutical industry being their largest advertiser. News organizations don’t investigate or report any information casting doubt on the government/pharma party line, because of the consequence for their profits. (We make a partial exception to this complaint on behalf of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page.)

We protest Covid vaccine mandates by governments and employers. We accept that the vaccines do provide partial protection from serious Covid reactions. But the Covid vaccines have risks and side-effects far beyond those reported even for other vaccines. So some people have good reasons to reject the vaccines for themselves or their children. And it is now known that these vaccines reduce transmission very little or not at all, as evidenced by a resurgence of reported infections, a year after the vaccination campaigns began. So one person’s rejection of the vaccine does not endanger others.

We protest the shocking disregard — by government, news media, health agencies, and physicians — of data in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. VAERS shows more serious events related to the Covid vaccines, than for all other vaccines combined since reporting began in 1990. And health professionals who study this data estimate that this represents only 1% of cases because reporting is optional and not systematized among the fragmented U.S. health institutions.

We protest Covid vaccines being forced upon children and young adults who don’t need them, when the long-term side-effects are still unknown. There is abundant evidence that asymptomatic children don’t increase infection incidence. But governments blindly forge ahead to inject these experimental substances into every human, based on advice from vested interests whose past actions and public health scandals reveal them to be untrustworthy.

We protest censorship by internet companies of dissenting views about Covid, in the service of political correctness and of the Big Pharma agenda. The titans of social media may wield monopoly power in the marketplace, but they have no monopoly on truth and wisdom in the realm of health and public policy. We judge these corporate dictators guilty of aiding and abetting the crimes of child abuse and neglect as outlined above. We specifically protest their idiotic censorship of the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors; and their corrupt suppression of the Children’s Health Defense organization.

There’s more. We will add to this list according to ideas suggested by members of the group.

Let’s acknowledge that we are the underdogs in this contest. The likelihood is that Big Pharma totalitarianism will triumph worldwide. All dissent will be swept away on the tide of the hero worship sought by our reckless leaders and their ethically compromised scientific advisors. Poisonous substances without end will be squirted into the bodies of every adult, child, and baby, and their cumulative toxic and carcinogenic effects will become the norm, so that nobody in the future will know or suspect that we collectively have been weakened and our lives shortened, in service to the mad scientists of money and power. This is where we are headed.

But maybe there’s something we can do. Let’s discuss it!