A new figure has joined the Twitter Files, claiming he was personally targeted by the director of Pfizer alongside the head of the FDA for spreading vaccine hesitancy.
Key Details
- The Twitter Files are nowhere near over, with independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger working with Twitter CEO Elon Musk to show how the company censored political perspectives and collaborated with the federal government.
- Former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson claims to have released the next iteration of The Twitter Files on his Substack and Twitter on Monday. Berenson is known for his criticism of COVID-19 policies and for criticizing the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
- Musk shared the thread but subsequently deleted the tweet after saying, “Some conspiracies are actually true.” Taibbi shared the thread as well and hasn’t deleted it.
- Berenson claims that Pfizer director Dr. Scott Gottlieb collaborated with Twitter to suppress vaccine-hesitant posts and even went as far as to suppress an FDA Head—a supposed conflict of interest from a company standing to benefit from mass vaccinations financially and wanting to silence critics.
Breaking Down The Newest Claims
Dr. Brett Giroir was a leading medical adviser during the Trump Administration, serving as the acting head of the FDA in December 2019, the assistant secretary of health for several years, and was briefly a representative to the executive board of the World Health Organization.
On August 27, 2021, Giroir tweeted, “It’s now clear COVID-19 natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity, by ALOT. There is no scientific justification for vax proof if a person had a prior infection. The CDC and President must follow the science. If you have no previous infection, get vaccinated!”
“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. Pfizer depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021 and paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year,” says Berenson.
According to the screenshots provided by Berenson, Gottlieb approached Twitter lobbyist Todd O’Boyle claiming that Giroir’s tweet was “corrosive” to the ongoing media discussions surrounding COVID and COVID vaccinations. Twitter’s response team found that Giroir’s tweet did not violate company policy but ended up attaching a “misleading” tag to the post and limiting its visibility.
Gottlieb would follow up with O’Boyle a week later requesting another hesitant vaccine account criticizing Pfizer’s push to open vaccines to children aged five to 11, a market Berenson claims Pfizer was eager to open as a new avenue for selling vaccines. Berenson claims that Gottlieb personally tried to suppress him as well, resulting in a Twitter ban.
“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. ‘I’m unconcerned about the debate being made. I’m concerned about physical threats being made for people’s safety,’” says Berenson.
