After YouTube Removal, DeSantis Hosts Second COVID-19 Roundtable

FLORIDA — After a video of a coronavirus roundtable discussion hosted by Gov. Ron DeSantis was removed from YouTube, Florida’s governor hosted a second roundtable on public health featuring some of the original panelists Monday morning.

Both events included panelists Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of former President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, as well as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff. They discussed various coronavirus topics, including wearing face masks and lockdowns.

During Monday’s panel, DeSantis slammed Google and YouTube, who “cited the insights of these experts…as being misinformation,” for removing videos of the March roundtable in Tallahassee.

The platform routinely hosts conspiracy videos on various topics, he added. “You can pretty much find any misinformation under the sun on Google YouTube. Now, Google YouTube has not been, throughout this pandemic, repositories of truth and scientific inquiry, but instead have acted as enforcers of a narrative, a big tech council of sensors in service of the ruling elite.”

The video from the March roundtable violated the social media platform’s standards, a spokesperson told NBC News.

The biggest area of contention is a discussion about whether children should wear masks, reports said.

According to NBC News' review of transcripts from the discussion, Kulldorff said, “Uh, 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.”

Bhattacharya said forcing children to wear masks “is developmentally inappropriate and it just doesn’t help on the disease spread.”

Atlas agreed, saying, “There’s no scientific rationale or logic to have children wear masks in school.”

Their comments go against the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that children 2 and older should wear masks during the pandemic.

The roundtable video was originally embedded in a story about the roundtable event by WTSP in the Tampa Bay area. It was flagged for removal by the American Institute for Economic Research, reports said. The nonpartisan economic think tank is based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

DeSantis called the original video’s removal “Orwellian.”

“It’s a big tech corporate media collusion and the end result is the narrative is always right,” the governor added. “Well, I don’t think that’s what the American people want, certainly not the people here in Florida.”

Though there's been a steady stream of new COVID-19 cases reported in Florida in recent months, the state saw a significant drop Monday. More than 1,600 new cases were reported, according to state data. This brings the total number of coronavirus cases in the state since the start of the pandemic last spring to 2,125,846.