American author and journalist Naomi Wolf has been suspended from Twitter after sharing disinformation about coronavirus vaccines, the pandemic and lockdowns.
A former advisor to Bill Clinton, Dr Wolf once claimed vaccines were a “software platform that can receive uploads”.
She also compared Dr Anthony Fauci, the top COVID-19 adviser in the US, to “Satan” to her more than 140,000 followers.
Known for her acclaimed feminist book, The Beauty Myth, the author has posted a wide-range of unfounded theories about vaccines.
Most recently, she claimed that urine and faeces of people who have received the jab need to be separated from general sewage supplies while tests are carried out to “measure its impact on non-vaccinated people through drinking water”.
Many social media users have reacted positively to news of the author’s Twitter suspension. “Thanks, @Twitter, for finally suspending Naomi Wolf for spreading harmful and floridly delusional anti-vax disinformation,” one user wrote.
Others, however, see the move as a blow to freedom of speech and have called for her account to be reactivated.
Some of the claims the self-styled “COVID truther” has made include that lockdowns are tantamount to “Jim Crow laws” (laws that legalised segregation in America) and “the best way to show respect for healthcare workers if you are healthy and under 65 is to socialise sensibly and expose yourself to a low viral load”.
Dr Wolf also told Sky News Australia: “Nowhere does it say in a sound and healthy society that you get to suspend civil liberties if there’s a disease around. That is not how it works in a democracy.”
Dr Wolf went viral in 2019 after factual errors were discovered in her then newly published book Outrages, which was born out of her Oxford PhD research into same-sex relationships in Victorian times.
Her book The Beauty Myth was named “one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century” by The New York Times.
Lately, she has been extremely critical of Joe Biden‘s leadership and recently said on Twitter that his COVID-19 policies were making her regret voting for him in the last election.