"My tweet was very factual," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told The Todd Starnes Show after the social media giant punished her earlier this week.
Greene, who was elected last November, remains a favorite target of Democrat lawmakers for her pre-Congress history that included dabbling in QAnon conspiracies. She apologized for those views in a floor speech but was tossed off congressional committees by the Democratic majority.
Greene's temporary suspension on Monday can be traced to earlier in the day when another GOP lawmaker, Rep. Thomas Massie, tweeted he is concerned about military readiness because members of the U.S. armed forces are leaving or retiring rather than be forced to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Greene piggybacked on Rep. Massie’s comment and stated in her own Twitter post:
The controversial #COVID19 vaccines should not be forced on our military for a virus that is not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65.
With 6,000 vax related deaths and many concerning side effects reported, the vax should be a choice, not a mandate, for everyone.
"It's information that you can look up,” Greene told the radio show. “And it's also true that many people in the military don't want to be forced to take the vaccine.”
USA Today reported vaccine deaths, too
Regarding the congresswoman's claim of vaccine-related deaths, One News Now did find a USA Today fact-checking article, published in June, that states:
Since clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccines began, VAERS has received more than 5,200 reports of death following vaccination.
VAERS is the Vaccine Adverse Reporting System, administered by the FDA.
In the article, USA Today unhappily recalls the VAERS death stats were cited by Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a May segment.
The fact-checking article concludes that vaccine skeptics are misusing VAERS data, such as calling the numbers a "death toll" from vaccines, but the story also states elsewhere that VAERS reported only 1,005 deaths from vaccinations from 2000 to 2020, a span of two decades.
That USA Today article, which was easily found online, mirrors Rep. Greene's tweet. Yet the congresswoman’s claims prompted a blue-font warning from Twitter that her comments are “misleading” and urged readers to “[L]earn why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.”
That warning label from Twitter is also a link which takes the reader to Twitter-approved posts from the CDC, vaccine maker Moderna, and left-wing news websites CNN, Reuters, The Washington Post, and Vox.
All of those articles follow a similar theme, assuring the reader of the overall "effiacy" and "effectiveness" of the vaccine, and the only controversy mentioned is over "mixing and matching" vaccines from different manufacturers.
"These are things that we should be able to say on social media platforms,” Greene complained to Starnes, “but what we're experiencing is corporate Communism."
In a story about Greene's suspension this week, CNN reported that Twitter punished her earlier this year for claiming her home state of Georgia was the victim of massive voter fraud. This latest suspension means she is a candidate for a permanent ban, the story said.
Unmentioned in the same CNN article is that Georgia is now embroiled in political drama over allegations of voter fraud in Fulton County, a Democrat stronghold, where almost 200 absentee ballots were counted twice, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported last week.
"The discovery of identical ballots provides evidence to back up allegations of problems in the presidential election," the article states, "but on a relatively small scale that had no bearing on the final certified count."
