Jessica Hockett, PhD

Article written on 17 July 2026

Archiving as a separate post my first censored tweet.

I no longer have a record of what I was reacting to because Twitter required me to delete the tweet before it would restore the account features it had “temporarily limited” as punishment for posting information it deemed “misleading.”

Policy violated

At the time, Twitter’s applicable rule was the COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy, including the vaccine-related expansion that took effect in December 2020 and the strike system introduced on 1 March 2021.

Twitter said it could remove false or misleading claims concerning:

• the nature and spread of the virus;
• the efficacy or safety of preventive measures and treatments;
• official health regulations and guidance; and
• the prevalence or risk of infection or death. 

For vaccine-related content, it also covered harmful false or misleading narratives about vaccination. Less severe material — including “unsubstantiated rumors, disputed claims,” or “incomplete or out-of-context information” — could receive a label, reduced visibility, and a strike rather than immediate removal. 

Why my tweet?

Because my tweet said that thousands of high-cycle-threshold positive PCR tests were being reported as cases and used to count or attribute deaths to the virus, the most directly applicable policy category was probably false or misleading information about the prevalence or risk of infection or death.

Alternatively (or additionally), Twitter could have treated the statement as incomplete or out-of-context information concerning COVID-19 vaccines, because the tweet linked the PCR issue to the CDC’s assessment of vaccine-related “breakthrough” cases.

Vindicated

Even by Official Narrative standards, the position I took was vindicated less than a month later, when the acting lead of the CDC’s Vaccine Breakthrough Team told me:

“In many cases it is challenging to determine the relationship between a SARS-CoV-2 infection and the reason someone was hospitalized or passed away.”

“It is Challenging to Determine the Relationship Between a SARS-CoV-2 Infection and the Reason Someone was Hospitalized or Passed Away”

She also said the CDC did not have data strong enough to determine what proportion of the reported hospitalizations and deaths were caused by the infection. For “breakthrough” surveillance, the CDC therefore separated at least some asymptomatic and clearly incidental positive tests (such as patients hospitalized for childbirth or car accidents) from COVID-related outcomes.

So, Twitter penalized me for raising a legitimate problem that the CDC itself acknowledged weeks later: a positive SARS-CoV-2 test did not establish that the infection caused, or even contributed to, a person’s hospitalization or death.

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