#TWITTERFILES – US intelligence agencies and the White House weren’t the only ones pressuring Twitter to censor content, downsize tweets or ban users. A senior Pfizer laboratory official intervened in late summer 2021 with the social network’s previous moderation team (thanked by Elon Musk) to prevent tweets about immunity and anti-Covid-19 vaccination , including in children, to go viral.
This 13th part of Twitter Files was published in January by Alex Berenson. This journalist and author revealed on Substack (a self-publishing platform, under subscription) that a director of Pfizer, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, had reported, in August 2021, a tweet from pediatrician Brett Giroir to Todd O’Boyle, a senior manager of the Department of Twitter public policies.
1/ My first #TwitterFiles report: how @scottgottliebmd – a top Pfizer board member – used the same Twitter lobbyist as the White House to suppress debate on Covid vaccines, INCLUDING FROM A FELLOW HEAD OF @US_FDA!
Thanks @elonmusk for opening these files.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) January 9, 2023
A ‘misleading’ tweet that ‘doesn’t break the rules’
In this tweet, the doctor, who had previously rubbed shoulders with Scott Gottlieb at the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), claimed that people infected with the coronavirus had a “better natural immunity” than that provided by the vaccine.
a tweet “corrosive” which could go viral according to an email from the head of Pfizer to Todd O’Boyle. The latter then transmitted the “complaint” Scott Gottlieb to the team “Strategic response” of Twitter, which was responsible for reporting the most important and followed users.
In his email, O’Boyle did not mention the position occupied by Scott Gottlieb at the American laboratory. He presented it as a “former FDA commissioner”. The director of Pfizer was also a contributor to the CNBC channel and “a dominant voice in the anti-covid public policy debate”. Alex Berenson reveals he was paid $365,000 by the pharmaceutical manufacturer for this job.
The social network’s “strategic response” team considered that Dr. Brett Giroir’s tweet “didn’t break any of Twitter’s rules on misinformation”. Yet the tweet in question was marked as “misleading”preventing other Internet users from seeing or sharing it.
This reaction is all the more surprising since Scott Gottlieb’s former colleague at the FDA “is not an anti-vax”, underlines Berenson. Brett Giroir called, later in the tweet, people who had not been infected to get vaccinated to acquire immunity.
The director of Pfizer, who is also a member of the management committee of the Board of Directors and responsible for the regulatory and compliance committee, reiterated his lobbying with the blue bird a week later, on September 3. A tweet analyst and author Justin Hart, whose account totals more than 100,000 followers, spoke of the low death rate among children “who were deprived of school for 3 years”.
“Threats against pro-vaccines”
The author of this 13th part of Twitter Files said to ignore why Scott Gottlieb objected to this tweet but reminded that vaccination in children from 5 to 11 years old was about to be authorized. In any case, this second attempt at censorship on the social network ended in failure: “This time, Twitter refused to act”, writes the journalist.
The manager at Pfizer had already explained this lobbying. In October 2022, he said on CNBC, then in a tweet, that he had no intention of “censor the debate on the mRNA doses of the vaccine”. Il justified his emails to O’Boyle through his “concern that tweets spark threats against pro-vaccines”.
According to Alex Berenson, Scott Gottlieb is also responsible for his own banishment from Twitter. As early as October 2022, the journalist had demonstrated that the Pfizer executive requested censorship of his tweets from the social network.
For the record, in the 12th part of Twitter filesit was journalist Matt Taibbi, currently being heard by the US Congress on the latter, who explained how content hostile to public anti-Covid policies and questions related to the origin of Sars-CoV-2 had been discredited .
Previously, the Twitter files explained how the social network had come under the control of American intelligence agencies, which multiplied the pressures and requests to censor content concerning the laptop of Hunter Biden (son of the current American president) or to flush out foreign, Russian interference and Chinese in particular.
The first episodes detailed the tools of the moderation team, led by Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde, to reduce the visibility of certain tweets or their authors, based on their own criteria. This very method that was applied to Dr. Brett Giroir’s tweet after Scott Gottlieb’s request.