This past Saturday, the Chicago Thinker spoke with Dr. Jessica Hockett about her recent permanent suspension from Twitter following her direct quotation of an op-ed from The Wall Street Journal criticizing the Biden-led “rush” to vaccinate children against COVID-19. Emma Woodhouse, Hockett’s pen name, is taken from the Jane Austen novel protagonist of the same name.
Since the start of the pandemic, Woodhouse amassed a significant presence on Twitter, where she gained upwards of 38,000 followers for astutely challenging the conventional wisdom from regime-designated “experts” vis-à-vis COVID, who have been broadly and consistently wrong about nearly everything. On July 6, Twitter permanently suspended her for directly quoting a WSJ article written by Allysia Finley entitled “Why the Rush for Toddler Vaccines?”
The reason Twitter gave for Woodhouse’s account’s suspension was for her quotation of the WSJ article: “It [my Twitter account] wasn’t locked over that data tweet. They cited The Wall Street Journal [as my reason for suspension].” The article was “questioning the speed with which the toddler EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) came out.” The offending quotation from Finley: “The FDA conspicuously lowered its standards to approve Covid vaccines for toddlers. Why?”
Regarding her suspension, Woodhouse told the Thinker that “It’s suppression of freedom of speech. It’s conservative-leaning, but The Wall Street Journal is a venerable news institution in the United States, like them or not.”
Despite this apparent bias by the social media giant, she doesn’t take her suspension too seriously, saying, “I’m not outraged about this. I think it’s sort of funny. I’ll let other people be outraged about it, but it’s funny in the sense that they’re [Twitter] just showing who they are.” She has sent an appeal to Twitter and is waiting for a response.
On the broader topic of Big Tech censorship, Woodhouse mentioned, “The US government and Big Tech have taken this position that you have to suppress all ideas that might mislead people. That’s not what we’ve ever championed in this country.”
This is not the first time Twitter has suspended Woodhouse. In July 2021, she was temporarily suspended for questioning wildly inconsistent school quarantine protocols. Two months later, she was suspended again for questioning the effectiveness of cloth masks. Then, Twitter permanently suspended Woodhouse in May 2022 for discussing data on rates of myocarditis induced by COVID infection versus by vaccination, though she successfully appealed the decision, and was reinstated. Woodhouse has documented all of these suspensions on her Substack.
The Thinker also reached out to Ian Miller, another Twitter skeptic of the CDC’s nonsensical COVID guidelines, friend of Woodhouse, and author of Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates, for comment.
“Twitter has repeatedly shown that they will suspend users on one side for sharing publicly accessible data from reputable sources, but refuse to take action against accounts spreading legitimately dangerous misinformation, like [COVID sensationalist] Eric Feigl-Ding, because he shares their political ideology,” Miller replied. “‘Emma’ has been a tremendous resource for those seeking accurate information and a champion for high-quality data analysis. It’s yet another disturbing example of politically motivated malice from Twitter.”
Twitter has never suspended Feigl-Ding, despite the fact that he’s spread many falsehoods about COVID. Such statements include overestimating the infectiousness of COVID by misrepresenting the results of a research paper, and blatantly misinterpreting a CDC graph so that he could claim younger generations are “just as likely to be hospitalized [due to COVID] as older generations,” which is untrue.
Woodhouse’s primary reason for doing these data analyses is that society cannot let truth be overtaken by blind worship of “credentialism.” Woodhouse, who holds four degrees, including a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Virginia, argues that “We’ve had so many problems in this COVID crisis with the fallacy of the ‘expert,’ and ‘You can’t talk because you’re not a virologist.’ … I’m going to present this data. And then if you want to take issue with it, take issue with it. But let’s not let credentialism get in the way. I really do believe in the marketplace of ideas.”
Woodhouse has recently criticized Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker for his cronyism and exercise of near-plenary powers over his state’s COVID policies. She highlighted that the governor’s capital management firm, the Pritzker Group, invested in two COVID testing companies, PathGroup and Cue Health, during the early stages of the pandemic. These auspiciously timed investments raised eyebrows about potential conflicts of interest on the governor’s part, who boasted in May 2020—less than two months after Cue Health was awarded a $13 million federal government contract to develop COVID tests—that “Illinois has overtaken New York to become the number one state in the nation for testing per capita over the past seven days”.
“[Pritzker] just won’t answer any questions about it because he says all of his assets are in a blind trust. That’s fine if it’s in a blind trust, but now that you know that the trust is invested in these things, what do you have to say for yourself? … It’s undeniable that most of the billionaires in this country have profited from the pandemic and the pandemic response,” Woodhouse said. The Pritzker Group has still not substantively responded to questions about conflicts of interest surrounding its investments into PathGroup and Cue Health.
When asked about Chicago’s enforcement of vaccine mandate violation fines after the mandate had been lifted, Woodhouse explained that the changes of policy have not been accompanied by politicians’ admissions of wrongdoing. “They [politicians] want to be able to use it [the vaccine mandate] again. They don’t want to admit they were wrong… The Illinois Department of Public Health and Illinois State Board of Education are lying when they say that schools have long-standing authority to continue to quarantine and to tell a kid to stay home if they’ve been exposed [to COVID]. They really need to apologize and say ‘Yeah, we were wrong.’”
The Thinker will update this article with any new information that comes to light regarding Woodhouse’s suspension.
Mitchell,
Jessica “has 4 degrees” but none related to anything of note to analyze and opine on Covid. She has a Ph.D. & 2 Masters in education fields, & a Masters in Communication. You infer she is a medical Doctor.
Check out this thread.
https://twitter.com/TruthVsTrumpGOP/status/1547249854791000064
If you truly are a journalist, you’ll convey this publicly available information, much of which is Jessica’s own writing, and which shows her hypocrisy, sophistry, and bigotry. Update your article with available information.
OK Bob LOL!!!! Sophistry? Pretty big ACT word for someone who doesn’t know the difference between infer and imply. Great thread though, it shows your pseudo intellectual pretzel logic much like the sophistry in your post here.
Bob, how many degrees do you have? To me, having four degrees suggests a person has the ability to understand any number of topics, not necessarily those related to their chosen formal education. I personally had enough credits for five majors in undergrad (physics, chemistry, math, accounting, and business administration) yet only consider myself “expert” (if there is any such thing) in two of them. Yet I was awarded the 1st patent ever issued for main frame application software (assigned to my employer: Amsted, Inc), an achievement which had little to do with my education per se. It did have everything to do with my native intelligence to comprehend data in a logical manner and arrive at a understanding of that data which eluded others for years.
When I was earning my Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, we were explicitly told not to rely on credentialism and appeals to authority. Rather, we were taught to lay out the evidence and write for the “intelligent University of Chicago sophomore” who would not have any specialized knowledge on the subject. If more people followed that approach, we as a country would be in much better shape.
Good read. Its a good fact based article that doesn’t inject opinion or take swipes at one side or the other. We need more of this. Well done.