Another batch of Twitter Files landed hot off the thread reader, focusing on how Big Pharma pushed its covid-vaccine-narrative onto social media.
Investigative journalist Lee Fang explained how vaccine manufacturer and distributor Pfizer partner BioNTech sought to censor those calling for low-cost generic vaccines in low-income countries.
Fang showed how Big Pharma took a page from Obama Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”.
Fang asserted that the files show Big Pharma “saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit.” This included shutting out others who could help with treatments and vaccines. He noted that “pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP…”
Twitter was admonished to look for hashtags such as #PeoplesVaccine, directed at pharmaceutical firms.
In December 2020, German biotech giant BioNTech emailed Twitter directly to ask content moderators to censor users who had posted tweets asking the company to share its intellectual property and patents to allow other drugmakers to produce generic vaccines at lower costs.That email was followed, one day later, with another from a European lobbyist representing the pharmaceutical industry warning Twitter about an impending campaign by activists calling for low-cost vaccines on the platform. The lobbyist cued Twitter to be on the lookout for users posting #PeoplesVaccine, among other hashtags.The lobbyist also asked the platform to keep an eye on the accounts owned by BioNTech, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna.“The authorities are warning about “serious consequences” of the action, i.e. posts and a flood of comments “that may violate [Twitter’s terms of service]” as well as the “takeover of user accounts” are to be expected,” the lobbyist warned.
Twitter ended up monitoring ‘fake accounts’ protesting Pfizer, …which turned out to be real people.
Fang revealed that Pfizer and Moderna’s marketing group BIO provided nearly $1.3 million to manipulate the “misinformation” policies to silence #PeoplesVaccine and other liberty-crushing vaccine policies such as vaccine passports.
Fang summed up his #TwitterFiles with an email and an observation that the silencing went only one way. Bold claims made by Big Pharma-approved sources were never challenged, censored, or labeled “misinformation.”
Fang’s analysis corresponds with the findings of former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who focused on Dr. Scott Gottlieb, President Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner and sitting board member of Pfizer. The findings also align with that of David Zweig, who showed how the critical debate about covid was stifled by bots, foreign contractors, and biased executives who pruned decision trees to determine specific tweets’ fate.
Before covid, Americans were generally keen to trust doctors and public health professionals automatically. Fang, Berenson, and Zweig have provided astonishing glimpses into the fiscal power of Big Pharma and the industry’s focus on profits instead of real science, national security, and basic humanity.
Of course, in doing so, Big Pharma has utterly destroyed our trust in it. Good luck convincing people to continue to agree to vaccines and medications in the future mindlessly.
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