A Prominent Vaccine Skeptic Returns to Twitter

One year ago this month, Twitter permanently suspended a 340,000-follower account for “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.” The owner of that account, the former New York Times reporter and vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson, responded with a lawsuit demanding reinstatement. Suffice to say that few observers thought he had any chance of coming out on top. One lawyer went through the complaint page by page on Twitter and concluded that Berenson had hired a “band of incompetent knock-off muppet lawyers” to present a doomed case.

Then, somehow, the muppet lawyers won. Earlier this summer, Twitter put Berenson’s account back online, noting that “.” Berenson wasted little time in calling out mainstream media for failing to cover the “” that led to his return. “I mean, imagine being @dkthomp right about now,” he triumphantly, in reference to my colleague Derek Thompson, who last year dubbed Berenson “.” Now he’s bent on being acknowledged as the victim of the pandemic’s wrongest .