THE PFIZER/WHITE HOUSE FILES

June 24, 2024 antivax, big tech

In July 2021, a senior Pfizer board member secretly began working with a Biden Administration operative to suppress criticism of Covid vaccines on X, newly released internal documents from X show.

Top officials at Twitter (now X) viewed the men – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the Pfizer director, and Andy Slavitt, the operative, who had officially left a senior White House post just weeks before – as speaking for the administration in their censorship demands, the documents show.

The new documents raise constitutional and legal concerns about the Biden Administration’s social media censorship efforts, as well as Pfizer’s role in banning criticism of a product that made up almost half its sales in 2021.

Within days, the Supreme Court is expected to decide Murthy v Missouri, a landmark lawsuit over the administration’s efforts to control debate on social media.

The new documents provide crucial perspective on the Missouri case, showing how far would-be censors went in 2021 to prop up public confidence in the Covid jabs. The documents also show the power the White House had over Twitter, which badly wanted to avoid a confrontation with it.

At the time, the Biden Administration was threatening to “review” a federal law commonly called Section 230, because it was angry social media companies were allowing Covid vaccine skepticism.

Section 230 was crucial to those companies for the near-total immunity it gave them against lawsuits from users. Twitter took threats to it seriously. “We will always be proactive and vigilant about protecting 230,” Lauren Culbertson, the company’s then-head of United States public policy, wrote on July 22, 2021.

None of these internal documents has been previously released.

They are part of a tranche of censorship-related material X is making available to me following searches of its internal archives.

Lawyers for X are reviewing the documents before releasing them. But so far only one document they have provided – an email from Jim Baker, Twitter’s then-deputy general counsel – contains any redactions.

In addition, no one at X, including Elon Musk, asked for or placed any restrictions on or had any input into the writing of this article. (Lawyers for X did ask to review it after writing but before publication, to be sure the names of junior employees or their email addresses were not included. Their review did not result in any changes.)

The censorship conspiracy by Slavitt and Gottlieb targeted me personally.

I am not named in any of the new documents provided so far. Slavitt and Gottlieb used careful – almost coded – language in their outreach to Twitter on July 18 and 19, 2021. They did initially not refer to any particular censorship targets by name. But emails and other internal Twitter documents that have already been released show I was a top target of both men.

I intend to use the newly released documents to amend Berenson v Biden, my complaint against Slavitt, Gottlieb, Pfizer chairman Dr. Albert Bourla, and the Biden Administration for conspiring to force Twitter to ban me in 2021. Gottlieb’s lawyers previously argued I had not alleged Gottlieb had had any contact with Twitter officials before August 2021. The documents show otherwise.

In fact, Slavitt introduced Gottlieb to Todd O’Boyle – a senior Twitter lobbyist who handled most of the company’s interactions with the White House – by email on Sunday, July 18, 2021. Slavitt, a longtime Democratic operative, had served as senior advisor to the Biden administration’s Covid response team.

“I wonder if you would be open to a 20 minute call with Scott Gottlieb and me about a policy matter,” Slavitt wrote. Slavitt referred to Gottlieb as “FDA commissioner under Trump” and failed to mention his role on Pfizer’s board.

Although he had officially left the Biden Administration weeks before, Slavitt’s email signature also contained his White House email address, asking that “Government Email” be sent there.

Slavitt’s outreach to O’Boyle came as the public debate over the Covid mRNA jabs was intensifying. The jabs, which had appeared very protective against Covid in the spring, were abruptly losing their effectiveness, causing the Biden Administration to consider encouraging Americans to receive a third “booster” shot.

The White House knew boosters – and potential vaccine mandates – would be controversial. As it tried to keep public confidence in the shots high, the administration escalated its attacks on Covid jab skeptics and on the social media platforms that gave them their biggest audiences.

Only two days before Slavitt’s email, on Friday, July 16, President Biden had said social media companies were “killing people” when they allowed vaccine skepticism. The firestorm that followed was mostly publicly directed at Facebook. But the new documents show that top officials at Twitter wanted to avoid similar criticism – or put Twitter’s Section 230 protection at risk.

On Monday, July 19, Gottlieb followed up by emailing O’Boyle directly, complaining about “false narratives on key public health issues” on Twitter.

Gottlieb told O’Boyle Twitter had an “affirmative obligation” to muzzle large accounts that made posts that concerned him. Gottlieb did not mention that he served on the board of a company that stood to make billions of dollars from the federal government if the Biden Administration rolled out booster shots and or jab mandates.

O’Boyle had already responded to Slavitt, offering to set up a conference call with the men that afternoon. “I’d be glad to speak with you and Scott,” he wrote Slavitt.

Note that O’Boyle’s response is time-stamped with a “UTC” code – he actually sent it at 9:22 a.m. Eastern time Monday morning, about 90 minutes before Gottlieb first emailed him.

O’Boyle also forwarded Gottlieb’s email to Culbertson, the head of Twitter’s United States public policy.

In turn, Culbertson sent it to even more senior officials with a comment indicating she viewed the email from Pfizer board member Gottlieb as directly related to the White House’s pressure campaign against vaccine skeptics. While the administration was angriest at Facebook, Twitter “could be next” and needed to “keep up the responsiveness,” she wrote.

Gottlieb increased the pressure on O’Boyle later in the week, after O’Boyle – apparently accidentally – failed to set up their promised conference call. Gottlieb, a regular panelist on Sunday morning political talk shows, wrote O’Boyle on Friday that he would be discussing the issue “on TV this weekend and wanted to just see if you still wanted to connect so I may have the benefit of your views.”

Within minutes, O’Boyle sent his “sincerest apologies” to the Pfizer board member and said he was “absolutely available.”

At the time, I was arguably the most prominent Covid vaccine skeptic on Twitter.

Slavitt had targeted my removal at least as early as April 2021, when he and Rob Flaherty, another White House official, met with Twitter and asked a “really tough question” about why the company had not suspended my account. I was also a sharp public critic of both Gottlieb and Slavitt.

But Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, supported me internally, and the company initially refused to ban me. By the summer, however, the Biden administration’s attitude towards vaccine skeptics had hardened. Meanwhile, Dorsey’s position at Twitter was increasingly tenuous; he would step down as chief executive in November.

Other Twitter officials did not appear to view the free speech rights of their users as a crucial issue in the same way as either Dorsey or Facebook’s top executives did.

In a note to other top Twitter lawyers and policy executives on July 19, Jim Baker, Twitter’s deputy general counsel, wrote only that “we have to be very thoughtful about how we interact with the government and what we say about it in communications with the USG [United States Government].”

So the White House censorship campaign came at a time when Twitter’s users were more vulnerable than they had ever been.

And it succeeded. In a matter of months, it forced Twitter, which had once called itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” to become willing to ban anyone – including me – who questioned the efficacy or risks of the Covid jabs.

Note: as X releases more documents to me about Gottlieb, Slavitt, and the 2021 censorship campaign, I will write more articles.

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