In August 2021, author and analyst Alex Berenson was permanently banned from Twitter for challenging the media and the current administration’s narrative about the COVID-19 vaccine.
The former NYT writer sued Twitter for the ban.
Karma has now smiled on Berenson, who Elon Musk, the new Twitter CEO, tapped to cover the social media platform’s handling of the information exchanges related to the covid vaccine.
This particular #TwitterFiles focuses on Dr. Scott Gottlieb, President Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner and sitting board member of Pfizer, a covid vaccine manufacturer.
Berenson shared an August 2021 email Gottlieb sent to Twitter’s senior public policy manager Todd O’Boyle flagging a tweet written by former Trump administration official Dr. Brett Giroir, who had written “It’s now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity, by ALOT. There’s no scientific justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection.””This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” Gottlieb told O’Boyle. “Here he draws a sweeping conclusion off a single retrospective study in Israel that hasn’t been peer reviewed. But this tweet will end up going viral and driving news coverage.”According to Berenson, O’Boyle forward Gottlieb’s email to Twitter’s “Strategist Response” team, writing “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.”Giroir’s tweet was later slapped with a “misleading” label and blocked any ability to like or share the tweet, telling Twitter users “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.”
It’s important to note that Dr. Brett Giroir is a physician who briefly followed Gottlieb as FDA head. Furthermore, Giroir’s tweet encouraged people who did not have a natural immunity to “Get vaccinated!”
Berenson’s #TwitterFiles was short-form, directing those interested to his Substack account.
Dr. Gottlieb never requested that the tweet in question be labeled as “misleading,” yet it was despite not being in clear violation of any Twitter policy at the time.
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.
In his Substack piece, Bereson explains Gottlieb’s financial ties to Twitter and Pfizer’s fiscal interest in good publicity for the vaccine. He asserts this is the motivation for complaining about tweets highlighting the effectiveness of natural immunity.
By suggesting some people might not need Covid vaccinations, the tweet could raise questions about the shots. Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on Covid public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year….Gottlieb is not just a Pfizer board member.He is one of seven members of the board’s executive committee and the head of its regulatory and compliance committee, which oversees “compliance with laws, regulations, and internal procedures applicable to pharmaceutical sales and marketing activities.”
Gottlieb haz teh sadz.
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