Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who currently serves on Pfizer Inc.’s board of directors, was previously the Lead Independent Director at Facebook, which has frequently censored user content related to the coronavirus outbreak and vaccines. She was also CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2014-2020.
Hellmann joined the tech giant’s board in March 2013 and held the position of Lead Independent Director from June 2015 until October 30th, 2019, not long before the first reported case of COVID-19.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, said, “Sue has been a wonderful and thoughtful voice on the board for six years, and I’m personally grateful to her for everything she has done for this company,” with regard to her departure from the company.
“I remain positive about Facebook and the mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Facebook’s Shareholders require a Board of Directors that is fully engaged and committed to address the critical issues confronting Facebook at this time,” Hellmann said of her tenure at Facebook.
“Unfortunately, increasing demands from my CEO role, my extended family, and my own health make it no longer possible for me to commit the necessary time and energy required to properly serve Facebook and its shareholders,” she added in a public statement.
During Hellmann’s time on the Pfizer board, Facebook has pushed campaigns to censor posts that question the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. Leaked internal documents from the social-media company reveal algorithms aimed at “drastically reduc[ing] user exposure to vaccine hesitancy (VH) in comments.”
As the National Pulse reports:
The 15-page document — titled “Vaccine Hesitancy Comment Demotion” — summarizes its goal as “reducing the visibility of these comments represents another significant opportunity for us to remove barriers to vaccination that users on the platform may potentially encounter.”
Potentially presenting another conflict of interest, Hellman also serves on President Joe Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which is described by the White House as the “sole body of external advisors charged with making science, technology, and innovation policy recommendations to the President.”
Hellmann’s former post at the Gates Foundation isn’t surprising for someone on the board of a vaccine manufacturer and who worked for a company that censors vaccine-skeptic content. Bill Gates is a major advocate for vaccines and sees shots as a way of reducing the global population.
The Gates Foundation has been supporting a program testing biometric ID vaccination records in Africa. Notably, the foundation has reportedly sent $54 million to fund “global health” projects in China since the outbreak of COVID-19. This includes major sums of cash to institutions controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as collaborators of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Facebook has also heavily censored content that offers evidence of voter fraud during the 2020 election.
As The New American recently reported, the founder of the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) — the election group heavily supported by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — is a former fellow at the Chinese state-funded Ash Center, which has advised officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who have been sanctioned for human-rights abuses by the U.S. government.
The CTCL received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple’s wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifetime) with the ostensible aim of “modernizing” America’s voting system.
The Amistad Project, an election-watchdog group, alleged that CTCL “used the money to illegally inflate turnout in key Democratic swing states as part of this effort.”
In a new defamation lawsuit against Facebook by journalist John Stossel, the social-media company’s attorneys appear to admit that the platform’s so-called “fact checks” are nothing more than “protected opinion.”
In a brief in that case, Facebook’s attorneys assert that the “fact check” labels the company uses are not fact — but opinion.
From the brief: “Stossel’s claims focus on the fact check articles written by Climate Feedback, not the labels affixed through the Facebook platform. The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion.”
