Ryan Roslansky
CEO
LinkedIn
605 W Maude Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94085
Dear Mr. Roslansky:
As you may be aware, I recently posted a link on your site to my open letter to you expressing concern about LinkedIn’s aggressive censoring practices. Rest assured, I didn’t take it personal that you didn’t respond. I appreciate you and your colleagues have been focused these past weeks buttressing your censorship team and practices, so you can cancel U.S. citizens with the same aggression you apply to Chinese nationals. Xi Jinping, China’s communist leader, has taught you well.
I’m writing as a courtesy to make certain you are aware of a shameful incident that happened on LinkedIn this past weekend, the censoring of a post by Dr. Katrin Kuhn linking to a Norwegian Institute of Public Health announcement downgrading Covid to other respiratory infections.
Quite simply, if LinkedIn regards Dr. Kuhn unqualified to provide insights about the Covid pandemic then pretty much no one is. Censoring Dr. Kuhn runs counter to LinkedIn’s purpose, which is to provide a forum for professionals to showcase their knowledge and expertise. My sense is that LinkedIn’s pandemic commentary policy is to only allow comments and links approved by the Biden Administration and their sycophantic corporate media enablers. In a slap on LinkedIn’s corporate face, Jeffrey Zients, Biden’s Covid czar, doesn’t think your site is worthy of his profile.
Perhaps your trigger-happy censor or your not-so-smart AI software didn’t notice, but Dr. Kuhn’s LinkedIn bio notes that she has a PhD in epidemiology from the prestigious London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I know tech geeks aren’t the most enlightened individuals, so possibly you don’t know that epidemiology is the branch of medicine focused on the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health. Put more simply, epidemiologists deal with complicated stuff, like Covid and how the disease gets transmitted.
Dr. Kuhn isn’t just any epidemiologist. According to her bio, she focuses on how infectious diseases behave and their “interplay between diseases, humans, animals, and the environment.” I’m possibly getting over my head here, but I seem to recall the corporate media insisting that Covid’s origin was bat transmission, and that any suggestion that it escaped from a lab in Wuhan was racist. Dr. Kuhn seems qualified to speak on this subject.
Allow me to provide some background on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in terms you can possibly understand. The school, a world-renowned center for research and postgraduate education in public and global health, is to infectious diseases education what Stanford is to technology and engineering.
Among the school’s alumni are Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization; Max Theiler, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for developing a vaccine against yellow fever; Kevin Fenton, the former head of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS Viral Hepatitis; Adel Mahmoud, the former president of Merck Vaccines; and Anders Tegnell, the Dr. Fauci of Sweden. Although its verboten to highlight this on LinkedIn, Sweden has fared much better during the pandemic than most countries with considerably less restrictions.
Dr. Marian Laderoute, who holds a PhD in immunology from the University of Alberta and previously worked for a pioneering biotech company, also posted that LinkedIn censored one of her posts. Silicon Valley dudes possibly associate Canadian women as being clad in Canada Goose parkas and having an appreciation for great beer, but in fact several have prominent places in medical history.
One is Dr. Leonne N. Farrell, who was critical to the mass production of the polio vaccine. Another was Frances Kelsey, the FDA examiner who refused to go along with other countries and approve the drug Thalidomide, which subsequently was linked to more than 100,000 babies born with deformities and 7,000 infant deaths. Big Pharma maligned Kelsey as a “bureaucratic nitpicker,” for refusing to go with the flow and approve a drug she knew was dangerous. If LinkedIn had been around in Kelsey’s day, I imagine you would have censored her as well.
LinkedIn’s censorship practices belie common sense. I learned of Dr. Kuhn’s censorship because her post protesting LinkedIn’s censorship appeared in my feed. In fact, my entire feed these days is comprised of highly educated people with advanced science degrees posting disturbing vaccine statistics and then complaining of being censored. If CDC’s PR folks were doing their jobs, they’d be pumping out LinkedIn posts countering the data and promoting studies assuring vaccine safety. Instead, they rely on LinkedIn to remove critical posts, which only fuels more doubt.
LinkedIn was once an innocuous place, a milquetoast site where members bragged about their promotions, companies touted their politically correct virtues, and people posted inane memes like, “Happy People Think Happy Thoughts.” Thanks to your censorship, it’s become a site rife with anger and venom. A few hours ago, a post from a MIT-educated scientist demanded to debate “liar” Dr. Fauci. I’m possibly mistaken, but I think its been removed.
I urge you to do some soul searching and perhaps investigate the lessons of censorship from other eras. You might want to research a guy named Goebbels, who would be in awe of the tools LinkedIn employs to silence people. I’m not aware of even once instance where scientific censorship contributed to a better world. Microsoft, your corporate parent, is consistently ranked as one of America’s most socially responsible companies.
In closing, I’m going to leave you with a thought that someone posted on a recent post of mine (that LinkedIn censored) and attributed to Dr. Roger Hodkinson, a Canadian pathologist:
“When the history of this (Covid) madness is written, there will be hundreds of books on it over the next few years, reputations will be slaughtered. There will be blood in the gutter because of the obvious insanity of what’s happening on a scale that’s never been seen before.”
I’m confident that history won’t judge LinkedIn’s aggressive censoring kindly. Maybe start making amends and send Dr. Kuhn letters of apology. I’d write them in English, Danish, German, Norwegian, Romanian, and Swedish.
Dr. Kuhn speaks all six languages.
Sincerely,
Eric Starkman