Censorship and COVID-19

My recent article on booster shots was censored by a prominent Medium publication.

Riad Kherdeen
4 min readOct 6, 2021
Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay

I recently published an article titled “COVID-19 Booster Shots: Boosting Immunity or Boosting Profits?” The article, however, was rejected by one of the publications that I often publish in because the editor who reviewed my article felt the need to “err on the side of caution and reject it as this article could impede vaccination efforts and violate Medium guidelines.” This editor must have mistook my article which questioned the Biden administration’s strategy to offer booster shots to the general public and the massive profits that the pharmaceutical industry would make from boosters as anti-vax propaganda.

In the article, I clearly stated that “vaccines are undoubtedly the best tools we have to protect ourselves from COVID-19 and manage the pandemic.” I myself am vaccinated against the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the formal name of novel coronavirus which causes the disease known as COVID-19), and have encouraged others to also get vaccinated.

I am, however, skeptical about the claim that everyone who is already fully vaccinated should get a booster shot six or eight months after their last shot. The data on the efficacy of booster shots for the general public is far from conclusive, and the outside advisory committee…

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Riad Kherdeen

New York-based historian. Your source for original, critical, thought-provoking content about art, history, culture, and politics.