A Pfizer board member leaned on Twitter to censor Tweets that questioned vaccine efficacy and safety.
Scott Gottlieb, who formerly headed up the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), also used his influence to pressure Twitter into flagging posts that criticised vaccine mandates and vaccine passports.
According to The Mail Online:
Documents leaked to controversial reporter Alex Berenson allege that Dr Scott Gottlieb leaned on the social media company to obscure a relatively innocuous post that cast doubt about the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness and suggested natural immunity was more effective.
The tweet – made by a former Government health official – was subsequently slapped with a ‘Misleading’ label, despite the debate around immunity still dividing scientists to this day.
The revelations are part of the Twitter files, a cache of internal documents and correspondences that have recently been made publicly available to a select number of journalists. Their aim is to highlight a range of censorship decisions Twitter made prior to the takeover by eccentric billionaire Elon Musk.
Dr Gottlieb is the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under President Trump and a member of Pfizer’s Board of Directors.
Documents show that on August 27, 2021, Dr Gottlieb emailed Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office, after seeing a tweet disparaging the Covid vaccines.
The tweet was posted by Dr Brett Giroir, another government health official under the Trump administration, and touted the superiority of natural immunity over vaccine-conferred immunity.
Dr Gottlieb, who currently has a Twitter following of about 550,000, lobbied for the Tweet to be flagged as misinformation.
Dr Gottlieb said in the email the language could prove ‘corrosive’ to the nationwide Covid vaccination campaign.
And even though Twitter could not prove outright that the tweet was a violation of its misinformation policy, it was slapped with a ‘Misleading’ label anyway.
Dr Gottlieb himself never requested that the tweet be labeled as such, just lamenting that the corrosive message would wind up ‘driving news coverage’ in a negative way.
Mr Berenson argued that Dr Gottlieb’s motivation for quashing the tweet, which cast doubt on the necessity of the vaccines, was financial. In saying that natural immunity through prior exposure to the virus was superior to that conferred by the vaccine, Dr Brett Giroir was placing Pfizer’s sky-high profits in jeopardy.
Dr Gottlieb’s financial ties to Pfizer were not flagged in internal emails regarding the tweet.
He was spoken about by execs at the social media company as ‘the former FDA commissioner’, but not a Pfizer stakeholder who would be affected by waning vaccine uptake.
