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'Conservative Review' podcast host Daniel Horowitz is one strike away from a permanent Twitter ban
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'Conservative Review' podcast host Daniel Horowitz is one strike away from a permanent Twitter ban

Blaze podcast host Daniel Horowitz of "Conservative Review" said Monday that his Twitter account has been temporarily locked after he tweeted about patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who were fully vaccinated.

In an op-ed, Horowitz wrote that a tweet he sent "around 3 p.m. Eastern on Friday afternoon" was flagged as "misleading" by Twitter and taken down.

The offending tweet discussed how a family told Horowitz that one of their own who has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 has nevertheless been hospitalized with a coronavirus infection and is "getting crappy treatment" at the hospital.

"[Gov. Larry Hogan] stop lying about the statistics. 72% of covid deaths in the UK were vaccinated from weeks 49-52," Horowitz tweeted.

Horowitz explained to TheBlaze that his tweet was responding to a claim made by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), who said last week that a small minority of his state's unvaccinated population is "overwhelming hospitals."

Twitter labeled the tweet "Misleading" and prevented other users from replying to, sharing, or liking the tweet.

Horowitz wrote that his account was temporarily suspended "without warning or notice for cause" shortly after the tweet was flagged and taken down.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The social media platform has strict rules prohibiting users from sharing "false or misleading information about COVID-19 which may lead to harm."

"When Tweets include misleading information about COVID-19, we may place a label on those Tweets that includes corrective information about that claim," Twitter's Help Center states. "In cases where we determine there is potential for harm associated with the misleading claim, we will disable the ability for others to Retweet, Quote Tweet, or engage in other ways to prevent the spread of the misleading information." Such tweets will cause one strike against a user's account.

According to Twitter, tweets that will earn a label include, "False or misleading information that misrepresent the protective effect of vaccines, to make claims contrary to health authorities. Claims that misrepresent research or statistical findings pertaining to the severity of the disease, prevalence of the virus, or effectiveness of widely accepted preventative measures, treatments, or vaccines."

In his op-ed, Horowitz elaborated on his tweet and argued that Maryland's governor is wrong to solely blame the unvaccinated for a surge in coronavirus hospitalizations while data suggests that even people who are fully vaccinated can still be infected and hospitalized with COVID-19.

The notion that everyone in the hospital with COVID is unvaccinated was always an illogical proposition. Take Maryland, for example. According to Maryland’s COVID dashboard, nearly every senior alive has at least one shot, and over 92.5% of all those above 18 have at least one shot. Even if the unvaccinated still compose a relatively disproportionate share of the hospitalizations, there are simply not enough of them to go around to “flood the hospitals.” You can still say there is a degree of efficacy for some people for serious illness (pre-Omicron) without fully lying to people and exaggerating to the point that they believe almost nobody with the shots gets clinically ill.

The data cited in his deleted tweet included raw data from the latest U.K. Health Security Agency vaccine surveillance report that shows during weeks 49-52 of 2021 (December), a significant number of COVID-19 positive people who died had received at least one vaccine dose.

"If you add up all of the unvaccinated deaths reported following 60 days from a positive COVID test within that window (928) and divide it by all the total deaths (3,718), you get 24.95% of the deaths being unvaccinated. In other words, 75% of the deaths recorded during that period were indeed vaccinated, nearly all of them double-vaccinated," Horowitz wrote. "So, if anything, I do apologize for the misinformation in the tweet where I said the vaccinated accounted for 72% of the deaths. It was actually slightly higher.

"Obviously, given the age-stratified vaccination rates, this still shows some degree of efficacy against mortality for the shots," he argued. "For example, 83% of all deaths among those ages 80+ were vaccinated, but almost everyone in that age cohort is vaccinated. None of us discount that fact. But that is a very different story from saying that the overwhelming majority of deaths in raw numbers are among the unvaccinated."

Horowitz told TheBlaze his account has been locked for seven days. According to Twitter's Help Center, that means there are at least four strikes against his account. A fifth strike levied for violating Twitter's COVID-19 misinformation policy will result in a permanent suspension.

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