Former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson permanently suspended by Twitter

Twitter has permanently banned Alex Berenson, a former New York Times journalist who has become a major critic of Big Tech censorship and coronavirus lockdowns and mandates. 

Responding to an inquiry from Fox News, where Berenson has been a frequent guest during the pandemic, a spokesperson for Twitter replied that "The account you referenced has been permanently suspended for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules."

Berenson responded on his Substack page, where he posted a message titled "Goodbye Twitter."

"This was the tweet that did it," he wrote, above an image of his Twitter account before being taken down. "Entirely accurate. I can't wait to hear what a jury will make of this."

What he had written in that tweet was that the coronavirus vaccine doesn't stop infection or transmission.

"Don't think of it as a vaccine," he continued. "Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS."

Berenson worked for the New York Times from 1999 to 2010, before leaving there to become a novelist, though he has also written several self-published non-fiction books and pamphlets since the start of the pandemic.

Berenson has proven to be a thorn in the side of Big Tech, the mainstream media and the medical establishment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, says that COVID-19 vaccines “are safe and effective.”  

In a December op-ed Berenson wrote for the Wall Street Journal, he warned that the pandemic had brought us to "a new age of censorship and suppression."

"Information has never been more plentiful or easier to distribute. Yet we are sliding into a new age of censorship and suppression, encouraged by technology giants and traditional media companies. As someone who's been falsely characterized as a coronavirus 'denier,'" he wrote at the time. "I have seen this crisis firsthand."

He had just ended a battle with Amazon over his self-published books. 

"Since June, Amazon has twice tried to suppress self-published booklets I have written about Covid-19 and the response to it," he continued. "These booklets don't contain conspiracy theories. Like the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, I simply believe many measures to control the coronavirus have been damaging, counterproductive and unsupported by science."