Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene over false vaccine claims

WASHINGTON — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has been temporarily suspended from tweeting for a week after she shared misleading information about Covid vaccines on the social media platform.

A Twitter spokesperson told NBC News that Greene’s tweet “was labeled in line with our COVID-19 misleading information policy” and “the account will be in read-only mode for a week due to repeated violations of the Twitter Rules.”

Greene tweeted Monday night that the Food and Drug Administration shouldn’t formally approve the vaccines, which have been available so far this year under emergency authorization by the agency.

The conservative freshman lawmaker falsely claimed that there are “too many reports” of infection and spread of Covid-19 among vaccinated people and that these vaccines are “failing.”

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“Vaccine mandates & passports violate individual freedoms,” she tweeted.

Twitter posted an alert on Greene’s tweet saying, “This tweet may be misleading,” and linked to information about preventative measures and Covid.

Public health officials have praised the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines and have actively encouraged people across the country to get inoculated. While there are some breakthrough cases among people who are vaccinated, they only have mild to moderate symptoms of the disease. In regions where large swaths of people are unvaccinated, cases have been skyrocketing.

Greene has made a number of controversial comments recently about the coronavirus. She suggested, for example, at a recent Republican fundraiser in Alabama that Southerners could threaten President Joe Biden’s “police state friends” with guns if they show up at their homes asking about their coronavirus vaccination status.

She has also compared mask mandates to the Holocaust and was stripped of her committee assignments for promoting various conspiracy theories. Greene made another Nazi-era comparison last month, saying people who knock on doors encouraging vaccinations are “medical brown shirts,” referring to the paramilitary organization that helped facilitate the rise of the Nazis and Hitler.

Greene was suspended last month for making false Covid claims and earlier this year for her comments on voter fraud.