Alex Berenson’s report on the Twitter Files, which details the effort by Pfizer Inc. to silence him because he told the truth about China Virus vaccines, might be the most amusing example of poetic justice since that Islamic suicide bomb instructor blew up 22 of his students.
Under pressure from the Biden administration, and now, we learn, Pfizer, Twitter suspended Berenson’s account. He prevailed in a lawsuit against the leftist social-media platform, and now, aside from that victory, is reporting on the Twitter Files that Elon Musk began releasing when he bought the company.
Even better, Berenson’s report concerns the subject that Twitter used as an excuse to ban him: vaccine “misinformation.” The files prove that a top Pfizer executive pushed Twitter to censor negative but accurate tweets about the potentially dangerous vaccines.
And one of them, for instance, didn’t come from an “anti-vaxxer.” It came from a former head of the Food and Drug Administration who favored the vaccine.
“Follow the Science”
The pro-vax former FDA chief was Brett Giroir, Berenson divulged yesterday on his Unreported Truths Substack page.
“On August 27, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb — a Pfizer director with over 550,000 Twitter followers — saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines,” Berenson explained:
The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after Covid infection was superior to vaccine protection. It called on the White House to “follow the science” and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates.
It came not from an “anti-vaxxer” like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but from Dr. Brett Giroir, a physician who had briefly followed Gottlieb as the head of the Food & Drug Administration. Further, the tweet actually encouraged people who did not have natural immunity to “Get vaccinated!”
But that didn’t matter, and Twitter slapped a “misleading” label on Giroir’s tweet.
Neither Gottlieb nor Pfizer would tolerate anyone suggesting that some people, namely the young and healthy, don’t need the vax.
Billions of dollars in profits were at stake.
“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,” Berenson reported.
Gottlieb pulled down a cool $365,000 in 2021.
To stop the truth insurrection, “Gottlieb stepped in, emailing Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who was also Twitter’s point of contact with the White House,” Berenson continued:
The post was “corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. He worried it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage.” …
Through Jira, an internal system Twitter used for managing complaints, O’Boyle forwarded Gottlieb’s email to the Twitter “Strategic Response” team. That group was responsible for handling concerns from the company’s most important employees and users.
“Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner,” O’Boyle wrote — failing to mention that Gottlieb was a Pfizer board member with a financial interest in pushing mRNA shots.
A Strategic Response analyst quickly found the tweet did not violate any of the company’s misinformation rules.
Yet Twitter wound up flagging Giroir’s tweet anyway, putting a misleading tag on it and preventing almost anyone from seeing it. It remains tagged even though several large studies have confirmed the truth of Giroir’s words.
Another Contrarian Shut Down
Yet Giroir wasn’t Gottlieb’s only target.
“A week later, on Sept. 3, 2021, Gottlieb tried to strike again, complaining to O’Boyle about a tweet from Justin Hart,” Berenson explained. “Hart is a lockdown and Covid vaccine skeptic with more than 100,000 Twitter followers.”
Like anyone who gave the matter some thought, Hart knew the Asiatic pathogen was virtually harmless to kids.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of <>0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling,” Hart tweeted.
“Why Gottlieb objected to Hart’s words is not clear, but the Pfizer shot would soon be approved for children 5 to 11, representing another massive market for Pfizer, if parents could be convinced Covid was a real threat to their kids,” Berenson continued:
But Gottlieb also had another stone in his shoe: Berenson:
At the same time, Gottlieb was also pressing Twitter to act against me, as I disclosed on Substack on Oct. 13, 2022, drawing on documents that Twitter’s pre-Musk regime provided to me as part of my lawsuit against it.
Indeed, Gottlieb was part of the group that pushed Twitter to ban the former New York Times writer.
“The morning after I wrote that article, Gottlieb appeared on CNBC, the financial news channel where he is a contributor, and offered what at best was a seriously misleading explanation of his actions and his motives,” Berenson reported:
Gottlieb did not deny pressing Twitter on me — he could not, given the documents I had released the night before.
But in an interview with Joe Kernan of CNBC, Gottlieb said he had asked Twitter to act only because he was concerned if tweets raised the threat of violence against vaccine advocates.
“The inability of these platforms to police direct threats, physical threats about people, that’s my concern about what’s going on in that ecosystem,” Gottlieb said.
Gottlieb also said he was “unconcerned” about a debate on the subject and then followed his remarks on television with this tweet:
Respectful debate and dialogue is one thing, and should be encouraged and protected. But there’s no place for targeted harassment, and misleading dialogue which can instigate a small but persuadable group of people to make targeted and dangerous threats.
But Giroir’s tweet “was the definition of ‘respectful debate and dialogue,’” Berenson rightly observed. “And in his own email to Todd O’Boyle, Gottlieb did not raise any security concerns about it. He simply complained that it might wind up ‘driving news coverage.’”
Berenson also added this note about Pfizer’s shady activities:
Pfizer has a long history of violating drug industry laws and ethics rules. In 2009, it agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in American history, for fraudulently marketing several drugs. In 1996, it conducted a clinical trial of an antibiotic in Nigeria in which 11 children died and which became the inspiration for John le Carre’s novel The Constant Gardener.
Berenson plans to sue Pfizer, Gottlieb, and the White House for pushing Twitter to silence him.
