Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee urged Wednesday that YouTube needs to answer for pulling down a video from two California doctors who disagreed about Coronavirus stay-at-home orders.
Accelerated Urgent Care doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi questioned the Coronavirus paranoia during a press briefing — the video went viral.
“These guys are medical doctors. They are scientists. For heaven’s sake, they didn’t say anything that was really disputable. They were giving facts [and] figures,” said Huckabee during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
“They were invoking some opinion in terms of giving [an] analysis of the facts they presented,” Huckabee continued. “I thought the most salient point they made in the course of the video — which I did see before it got pulled — was that historically when you have a pandemic, you quarantine the sick people — not the healthy people. And that was sort of like, you know, the light bulb went off.”
He added that YouTube has to answer regarding selective content and the way that they have “censored anything that just doesn’t fit their own agenda. Something is wrong with that — with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google.”
Erickson responded and said the video was composed of raw data and was labeled accurately.
“We had tested about 5,213 at the time of that video and we had about 340 positive, which is 6.5 percent. So, I was giving them raw data. It was not a biostatistical analysis. It was not peer-reviewed. And we didn’t say that it was. It was merely raw data,” he told “Fox News @ Night” Tuesday.
YouTube issued a statement Tuesday regarding the removal of the video press briefing.
“We quickly remove flagged content that violate our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance,” said the statement. “However, content that provides sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic (EDSA) context is allowed — for example, news coverage of this interview with additional context. From the very beginning of the pandemic, we’ve had clear policies against COVID-19 misinformation and are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.”
CNJ’s Corine Gatti-Santillo