Moderna Secretly Polices COVID ‘Vaccine Misinformation’ to Control Narrative: Investigative Report

Pharmaceutical giant Moderna is policing what it calls “vaccine misinformation” online through its disinformation department aimed at shutting down dissenting voices and anything that might undermine COVID-19-related policies, such as lockdowns, vaccine passports, and mass vaccination.

Before joining “Moderna’s corporate security team” in 2022, Ms. Rutman worked as an intelligence analyst in the U.S. intelligence community for nearly 19 years, most of which was spent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). According to the report, Ms. Rutman was working from the FBI’s Boston office during the COVID-19 pandemic and “Operation Warp Speed,” which involved weekly cybersecurity meetings with Moderna, also headquartered in Boston.

Before her role with the FBI, Ms. Rutman worked for the Director of National Intelligence as an “adviser on terrorism to a mission manager” and as a counterintelligence analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Ms. Rutman is only one of many former law enforcement agents working on Moderna’s monitoring team, along with a drug industry-funded NGO called the Public Good Projects (PGP) and Talkwalker, an artificial intelligence firm that uses its technology to monitor vaccine-related discussions across 150 million websites in nearly 200 countries.

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According to Mr. Fang, PGP is an “anti-misinformation NGO” financed through a $1,275,000 donation from the Biotechnology and Innovation Organization—lobbyists representing Pfizer and Moderna—that works closely with social media platforms, government agencies, and news websites to classify and combat alleged vaccine misinformation.

“We know from a separate batch of documents—the Twitter files—that I reported earlier this year, that the same partners that are working with Moderna—PGP and some of these other NGOs—had a direct line to Twitter’s executives, and they also worked with Google and Facebook to shape content moderation policies,” Mr. Fang told The Hill.

These Moderna-funded NGOs were pressuring social media companies to change their content moderation policies and delete and “de-amplify” specific tweets critical of coercive vaccine policies, Mr. Fang said. “They were actually sending entire Excel documents with tweets they wanted censored,” he added.

Talkwalker’s website states it is a “social listening and consumer intelligence platform” that helps pharmaceutical businesses by providing an array of services, including “above brand monitoring” and “misinformation detection.” Neither PGP nor Talkwalker has publically disclosed how they define “misinformation” or who determines that one’s speech falls into this category. However, Mr. Fang and Mr. Poulson say these organizations, along with marketing executives and former FBI and Secret Service analysts, provide misinformation alerts to Moderna.

“None of the reports that we have seen makes any attempt to dispute the claims made,” Mr. Fang and Mr. Poulson wrote. “Rather, the claims are automatically deemed “misinformation” if they encourage vaccine hesitancy.”

Beyond identifying and attempting to censor subjectively determined vaccine misinformation, Moderna has provided talking points and advice to a network of 45,000 healthcare professionals—unbeknownst to their patients—on “how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream,” according to an email from Moderna.

The Moderna internal report entitled “Djokovic Crowned Anti-vaccine Hero after US Open Win” stated the “optics of Djokovic” bolsters “anti-vaccine claims that vaccines—and mandates—are unnecessary.”

Mr. Musk, CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, Inc., and owner of “X,”  was also classified as “high risk” because he mocked the media and government officials who erroneously claimed COVID-19 vaccines were 100 percent effective against the virus. Moderna’s report didn’t identify any false statements. Still, it raised concerns that pointing out the “deception by health authorities and health care providers during the pandemic” would “lay the groundwork to sow distrust in credible sources on vaccine safety and effectiveness.” In other words, Moderna wasn’t flagging the video because it was wrong but because it negatively shaped public discourse around COVID-19 vaccines.

Although some tweets flagged by Moderna’s disinformation team were legitimate misinformation, many were “genuine points of disagreement around coercive vaccine policy,” such as vaccine passports and mandates, Mr. Fang told The Hill.

Another Moderna report flagged an Oct. 5 post on X that expressed Mr. Musk’s opposition to vaccine mandates. The report states: “Musk has one of the largest platforms in the world—literally and figuratively. He increasingly uses that platform to elevate fringe vaccine opponents and conspiracy theorists.”

“These mandates were not successful in increasing vaccination rates. It got tens of thousands of Americans fired or pushed out of their jobs. These were controversial policies that were eventually overturned by the Supreme Court,” Mr. Fang said.

“This is not an area of misinformation that needed to be censored. This was a legitimate area of public debate around the very controversial and novel application of public policy that benefited just a small number of corporations,” he added. “Basically, the government forcing you to buy a certain product and to use it in your body. This is a bodily autonomy issue—a public health area that deserved more scrutiny, not less.”

Russell Brand, a critic of pharmaceutical companies, was also flagged for his claim that Moderna and Pfizer made $1,000 of profit every second from the pandemic because his views are “circulated in anti-vaccine spaces where he is viewed as a truth-teller and threat to authority,” the report said.

“Where this is potentially problematic is that if you look closely at these misinformation reports, they are clearly blurring the line between fighting actual disinformation—intentional lies—and classifying legitimate points of discussion around vaccine policy as dangerous misinformation,” Fang told The Hill. “They’re taking kind of a broad brush and painting any kind of criticism of their company vaccines as dangerous misinformation.”

“The most important thing for Moderna is that people keep having their jabs. Smart ads are part of that. But more important is to push back aggressively against any prevailing anti-vax narrative and engage where possible in any discussions around vaccine policy,” wrote Mr. Fang and Mr. Poulson. “That’s where the Moderna disinformation department comes in.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to Moderna for comment.