Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson has been permanently suspended from Twitter for repeatedly violating the social platform’s rules against spreading COVID-19 misinformation, according to a spokesman for the tech giant.
Twitter initially gave Robinson, who has relentlessly pushed anti-vaccine falsehoods for more than a year, a temporary time-out last week after she posted an insanely absurd claim that the COVID-19 vaccines contained a glowing tracking device that was linked to the devil.
“Dear Christians: the vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” Robinson declared last Monday. “Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends.”
While some vaccine research has used the enzyme luciferase, which has bioluminescent features, it is not an ingredient in any of the coronavirus vaccines currently on the market. Furthermore, luciferase does not have any satanic associations despite deriving its name from the Latin word lucifer, which means light-bearing.
Besides receiving the reprimand from Twitter at the time, Robinson was also benched by Newsmax over her blatantly false claims about the vaccines. Prior to taking Robinson off the air pending a review of her anti-vax social-media posts, Newsmax also publicly rebuked its controversial star.
“Newsmax strongly believes and has reported that the Covid 19 vaccines are safe and effective. We do not believe the vaccines contain any toxic materials or tracking markers, and such false claims have never been reported on Newsmax,” the network said in a statement. “The many medical experts appearing on Newsmax have supported the use of the vaccine.”
After serving her week-long Twitter lockout, the conservative firebrand returned to the social media site with a fury on Tuesday morning. Proclaiming that she was back on Twitter “at least”—seemingly throwing shade at Newsmax for sidelining her—Robinson then promoted her account on Substack, a subscription newsletter service.
“Join me at Substack today before I’m banned again,” she wrote, sharing a link to a post in which she doubled down on her disproven claims about luciferase and vaccines.
Robinson would continue to implore her followers to join her Substack page, which included a new post on Tuesday that again suggested the vaccines were linked to Satan.
“One more thing: the new COVID-19 antibody test is called SATiN and it uses Luciferase. No, I’m not kidding,” she wrote. “It’s not an accident that they’ve given this name to this test. It’s a warning.”
Eventually, Twitter decided to shut her account down for good.
A Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Beast that Robinson’s Twitter account, which had nearly 450,000 followers, “was permanently suspended for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.”
Robinson’s future with Newsmax, meanwhile, remains up in the air. Following publication, a network spokesperson told the Daily Beast that the far-right reporter “remains off-air as Newsmax reviews matters relating to her posts made outside of the channel on her own social media,” adding that the network has “not determined when she will return to the air.”