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Before billionaire CEO Elon Musk releases the Fauci Files, the 13th installment of the Twitter Files has been published. In this edition, former New York Times reporter and author Alex Berenson revealed how Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner and senior board member at Pfizer, went on a campaign to censor a US government official for championing natural immunity. What else did Berenson find in the treasure trove of information at the San Francisco-based social media platform?
The Twitter Files: Part 13
On Aug. 27, 2021, Dr. Brett Giroir sent out a tweet that would eventually be slapped with a misleading label and prevented from being widely disseminated:
“It’s now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity, by ALOT. There’s no science justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection. @CDCDirector @POTUS must follow the science. If no previous infection? Get vaccinated!”
So, two things: The tweet supported natural immunity and advocated for vaccinations. But this perturbed Gottlieb. He sent an email to Todd O’Boyle, a high-level lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who served as the company’s point of contact with the White House, calling the tweet “corrosive.”
“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive. 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,” Gottlieb wrote.
O’Boyle forwarded the email to the social network’s Strategic Response team, which manages concerns from the website’s top employees and users. Initially, an analyst determined the tweet did not violate any misinformation rules, but Dr. Giroir’s tweet was flagged anyway. This has been a common theme in these Twitter Files: Employees do not find the content violating Twitter policy, but the tweets are targeted regardless because they might have contradicted a narrative.
The latest developments caught the attention of the former Assistant Secretary of Health, who tweeted: “@ScottGottliebMD’s behavior speaks for itself. A former @FDA commissioner (now @Pfizer board member) schemed with a lobbyist & @Twitter to apparently put corporate interests first – not public health. If anything, we need more open, honest, uncensored debate – not less.”
Gottlieb used his influence to then focus on a tweet from author Justin Hart. On. Sept. 3, 2021, Hart tweeted that “a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of ~0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling.” According to Berenson, Gottlieb’s complaints did not result in any action by Twitter staff.
“Pfizer would soon win the okay for its mRNA shots for children, so keeping parents scared was crucial,” Berenson stated.
(Photo by Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, following Berenson’s Twitter ban, Gottlieb appeared on CNBC and explained why he asked the social media outlet to take action: concerns over threats 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 told host Joe Kernan on Oct. 14, 2022. “I’m unconcerned about debate being made. I’m concerned about physical threats being made for people’s safety.”
However, as Berenson noted in his coverage, he never mentioned anything about security fears in his emails to O’Boyle. Gottlieb, who is also the head of Pfizer’s regulatory and compliance committee, only worried about “driving news coverage.”
Scott Gottlieb Responds
Soon after Berenson reported on the latest Twitter Files, Gottlieb took the time to compose an eight-tweet thread, justifying his actions and accusing reporters of “selective disclosure of my private communications.”
“In the past, I’ve raised concerns with Twitter related to the safety of me and others, and threats being made on the platform. This included direct as well as specific threats. Sometimes it included statements that I believed were purposely false and inflammatory,” he wrote.
Gottlieb also shared emails he had sent to O’Boyle about specific threats made to him and others who uttered mean comments online. Gottlieb closed the thread to the public, so they could not reply.
What’s Next?
Berenson plans to report more on the Twitter Files in the coming weeks. But, of course, the Twitterverse is still waiting for the Fauci Files that Musk had said would be published last week. As everything that the likes of Berenson, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger have reported in the previous month, Twitter, in partnership with the government and corporate officials, advanced specific messages, censored contradictory commentary, and targeted the opposition. So, what else will the Twitter Files expose?
