By Jorge Casuso

July 28, 2020 -- A renown Santa Monica pediatrician was among the doctors who questioned the medical response to the coronavirus pandemic in a viral video censored by major social media outlets Monday.

In the video posted by the conservative website Breitbart News, Dr. Robert C. Hamilton calls for the reopening of schools, saying that data indicate that "children are not the drivers of this pandemic.

"They are not passing it to their parents, they are not passing it to their teachers," said Hamilton, who established Pacific Ocean Pediatrics in Santa Monica in 1996.

"We can send children back to school without fear" if proper precautions are taken, said Hamilton, renewing a call he made in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on May 18.

Hamilton cited Mark Woolhouse, a leading epidemiologist and British government adviser who found no known case of the virus transferring from student to teacher.

"There has not been one documented case of COVID being transferred from a student to a teacher in the world," said Hamilton, who is associated with Saint John's Medical Center.

Hamilton, who is famous for his method of quieting a crying infant, said the main obstacle is posed by special interest groups.

"The barrier is not going to be the science, it's going to be the unions, the teachers groups that are going to demand money," he said.

Those groups, Hamilton said, want to defund the police and "shut privately funded charter schools."

Hamilton was the first of a dozen speakers in the videotaped press conference held by America's Frontline Doctors in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.

The video -- which claims that a massive disinformation campaign is spreading widespread and unfounded panic about the pandemic -- garnered 17 million views on Facebook before the platform took it down.

President Trump retwitted the video before it was also removed by Twitter and YouTube, which is owned by Google.

Facebook removed the video "for sharing false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19,” said company spokesperson Andy Stone.

In the video, doctors question the efficacy of facemask mandates and cite studies indicating that taking hydroxychloroquine, zinc and Zithromax in the early stages of the cornonavirus can prevent deaths.

A recent opinion piece published in Newsweek magazine by Dr. Harvey A. Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, cites seven recent studies to bolster those claims.

In the column, Risch, who has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, said the studies "have demonstrated" the benefit of "the immediate early use of hydroxychloroquine in high-risk patients."

"When this inexpensive oral medication is given very early in the course of illness, before the virus has had time to multiply beyond control, it has shown to be highly effective, especially when given in combination with the antibiotics azithromycin or doxycycline and the nutritional supplement zinc," Risch wrote.

Stone said Facebook is countering the claims made by the doctors at Monday's press conference.

The company is "showing messages in News Feed to people who have reacted to, commented on or shared harmful COVID-19-related misinformation that we have removed, connecting them to myths debunked by the WHO," referring to the World Health Organization.

As of Monday, nearly 150,000 people infected with the virus have died in the U.S., which has an estimated population of 328 million.