Prashant Bhushan said he was sceptical about young and healthy people getting COVID-19 vaccines.
A tweet by activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan about vaccines has been flagged as "misleading" by Twitter, prompting the 64-year-old to double down on his stance against what he called "indiscriminate" vaccination.
Attaching a news article about a case where a 45-year-old woman died 10 days after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, Mr Bhushan had tweeted on Monday morning that it was "irresponsible to promote universal vaccination of experimental and untested vaccines especially to young and Covid recovered".
In a follow-up tweet, he wrote: "The healthy young have hardly any chance of serious effects or dying due to covid. They have a higher chance of dying due to vaccines. The covid recovered have much better natural immunity, than the vaccine gives them. Vaccines may even compromise their acquired natural immunity."
It was this tweet that earned him censure by the social media platform, which slapped on a warning that its content was "misleading", along with a slew of posts by other users criticising his view.
Unfazed, Mr Bhushan posted a deeper dive summarising his "vaccine scepticism" and said he was "shocked by attempts to censor such contrarian views".
The move by Twitter comes weeks after another similar high-profile labelling, as "manipulated" of tweets by BJP leaders like Sambit Patra who accused the opposition Congress of preparing and sharing a "toolkit" or strategy document to corner the government over its Covid lapses.
Twitter has stepped up its policing of content on its platform since the attack on the US Capitol by Donald Trump supporters in January this year, going as far banning the former president from the social network.
Separately, Twitter has been embroiled in a bitter clash with the BJP-led government at the centre over issues ranging from requests to take down tweets supporting the farmers' protest, discrediting posts by leaders of the BJP and more recently new regulation.