US House Establishes Panel to Investigate Potential Weaponization of Federal Government
Samizdat – 11.01.2023
WASHINGTON – The US House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a resolution establishing a select subcommittee to investigate whether components of the federal government have been weaponized against everyday citizens.
House lawmakers passed a resolution establishing the special Judiciary Committee panel in a vote of 221-211, falling along partisan lines.
“Congress hasn’t kept pace with the federal government’s potential to abuse new technology, and we need to better understand how US intelligence agencies work with each other and with the private sector to collect information on Americans or to undermine their fundamental constitutional rights,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a statement on the panel.
The subcommittee will investigate how the FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security and other executive branch agencies obtain information from and provide information to the private sector and other agencies to facilitate actions against US citizens.
The panel will be granted access to information shared with the House Intelligence Committee and the authority to review ongoing criminal investigations. The panel is styled after the Church Committee of 1975, which conducted similar oversight of federal agencies.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will name 13 members to the subcommittee, including five Democrats in consultation with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Landmark Lawsuit Slaps Legacy Media With Antitrust, First Amendment Claims for Censoring COVID-Related Content
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 10, 2023
In a live interview this evening on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), announced that he and several other plaintiffs filed a groundbreaking novel lawsuit making antitrust and constitutional claims against legacy media outlets.
The lawsuit targets the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a self-described “industry partnership” launched in March 2020 by several of the world’s largest news organizations, including the BBC, The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and The Washington Post — all of which are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas-Amarillo Division, the lawsuit alleges these outlets partnered with several Big Tech firms to “collectively censor online news,” including stories about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election that were not aligned with official narratives regarding those issues.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include CHD, Kennedy, Creative Destruction Media, Trial Site News, Ty and Charlene Bollinger (founders of The Truth About Cancer and The Truth About Vaccines), Erin Elizabeth Finn (publisher of Health Nut News ), Jim Hoft (founder of The Gateway Pundit ), Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ben Tapper, a chiropractor.
All of the plaintiffs allege they were censored, banned, de-platformed, shadow banned or otherwise penalized by the Big Tech firms partnering with the TNI, because the views and content they published were deemed “misinformation” or “disinformation.” This resulted in a major loss of visibility and revenue for the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit further alleges that Big Tech firms, having partnered with the TNI, based their decisions on determinations jointly made by TNI, which touted its “early warning system” by which each partner organization is “warned” about an individual or outlet that is disseminating purported “misinformation.”
The TNI’s legacy media and Big Tech firms then acted in concert — described in legal terms as a “group boycott” — to remove such voices and perspectives from their platforms. This forms the basis of the lawsuit’s antitrust and First Amendment claims.
Remarking on the lawsuit, Kennedy told The Defender :
“My uncle, President Kennedy, and my father, the attorney general, sought to prosecute antitrust laws that are still on the nation’s books, with vigor.
“As private enforcers of those laws, we are confident that the federal court in Texas will vindicate our bedrock freedom to compete with legacy media in the marketplace of ideas.”
Mary Holland, CHD president and general counsel, told The Defender :
“I’m glad that CHD is bringing this case. We are hopeful we will get a fair hearing, and I’m glad that we are together with other organizations that have also been harmed by these corporate and governmental censorship policies.
“To have a free society, you have to have free speech, you have to have a diversity of views. We don’t have the same views as all of the other plaintiffs by far … but we want to protect the marketplace of ideas.
“If in fact the government and the corporations they collaborate with can engage in censorship and propaganda nonstop, and there are no alternative voices, democracy is dead.”
Charlene Bollinger similarly remarked on the importance of preserving free speech. She said:
“This lawsuit is about preserving our free speech rights as Americans and holding those involved in violating antitrust laws accountable, like the TNI.
“My husband and I remain steadfast in our commitment to highlighting the well-documented risks of COVID-19 vaccines and the myriad of dangers to those who are not informed by their healthcare providers of the side effects of harsh pharmaceutical treatments for life-threatening illnesses.”
Mercola, in turn, focused on collusion between government agencies and media and Big Tech. He said:
“These are the twin evils of our day. Platforms partner with the alphabet soup of federal agencies to censor speech. Those same platforms and legacy media outlets conspire to boycott stories that don’t fit an official narrative about COVID and many other topics.
“Our nation’s founding fathers would be appalled and resolute in defense of maintaining an informed citizenry.”
Alleging per se and “rule of reason” violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act on the basis of direct and circumstantial evidence of horizontal agreement and economic collusion among the defendants and Big Tech firms, the plaintiffs are requesting a jury trial and treble damages.
They also are requesting orders declaring the defendants’ conduct unlawful and enjoining further such actions on their part.
TNI viewed organizations reporting non-establishment views as ‘an existential threat’
The lawsuit states, “There are two main categories of TNI members, playing different but often complementary roles in the online news market: (A) large legacy news organizations (hereafter the TNI’s ‘Legacy News Members’) and (B) Big Tech platform companies (hereafter the TNI’s ‘Big Tech Members’).”
Legacy news organizations are publishers of original news content and include the defendants named in the lawsuit.
“By contrast,” the lawsuit states, “the TNI’s Big Tech members — Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft — are first and foremost Internet companies, each of which is, owns or controls one or more behemoth Internet platforms, including social media platforms and search engines.”
“Core partners” of the TNI include the AP, Agence France Press, the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Reuters, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter and The Washington Post.
The lawsuit’s executive summary states:
“The TNI exists to, in its own words, ‘choke off’ and ‘stamp out’ online news reporting that the TNI or any of its members peremptorily deems ‘misinformation.’
“TNI members have targeted and suppressed completely accurate online reporting by non-mainstream news publishers concerning both COVID-19 (on matters including treatments, immunity, lab leak, vax injury, and lockdowns/mandates) and U.S. elections (such as the Hunter Biden laptop story).”
The lawsuit also alleges:
“By their own admission, members of the [TNI] have agreed to work together, and have in fact worked together, to exclude from the world’s dominant Internet platforms rival news publishers who engage in reporting that challenges and competes with TNI members’ reporting on certain issues relating to COVID-19 and U.S. politics.
“While the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ publicly purports to be a self-appointed ‘truth police’ extirpating online ‘misinformation,’ in fact it has suppressed wholly accurate and legitimate reporting in furtherance of the economic self-interest of its members.”
According to the lawsuit, “this is an antitrust action,” and specifically, “Federal antitrust law has its own name for this kind of ‘industry partnership’: it’s called a ‘group boycott’ and is a per se violation of the Sherman Act.”
Legal precedent holds that a “group boycott” is “a concerted attempt by a group of competitors” to “disadvantage [other] competitors” by “cut[ting] off access” to a “facility or market necessary to enable the boycotted firm[s] to compete.”
As evidence of this allegation, the lawsuit references multiple public statements by TNI partners, including a March 2022 statement by Jamie Angus, then-senior news controller for BBC News, who explained TNI’s “strategy to beat disinformation”:
“Of course, the members of the Trusted News Initiative are … rivals … But in a crisis situation like this, absolutely, organizations have to focus on the things they have in common, rather than … their commercial … rivalries. … [I]t’s important that trusted news providers club together.
“Because actually the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms . … That’s the real competition now in the digital media world.
“Of course, organizations will always compete against one another for audiences. But the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations. So actually we’ve got a lot more to hold us together than we have to work in competition with one another.”
The lawsuit alleges the above quote admitting the “existential threat” members of the TNI believed smaller news organizations posed to their news and informational primacy is evidence of anti-competitive collusion and of TNI members’ economic motivation to stifle this “threat”: “a paradigmatic antitrust violation … to cut off from the market upstart rivals threatening their business model.”
Angus has since left the BBC to take a position with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned television broadcaster, according to the lawsuit.
“Plaintiffs are among the many victims of the TNI’s agreement and its group boycott,” states the lawsuit. “Plaintiffs are online news publishers who, as a result of the TNI’s group boycott, have been censored, de-monetized, demoted, throttled, shadow-banned, and/or excluded entirely from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.”
As a result of this “group boycott,” the lawsuit states:
“The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.
“Thus TNI members not only suppressed competition in the online news market but deprived the public of important information on matters of the highest public concern.”
The plaintiffs referenced Supreme Court precedent — specifically, a 1945 ruling involving the AP — to support their First Amendment claims against TNI, noting that contrary to popular belief, First Amendment violations do not exclusively refer to the censorship of speech by the government.
The lawsuit states that in the 1945 case, Associated Press v. United States, a news industry partnership (the AP ) “prevented non-members from publishing certain stories.”
These non-members sued under the Sherman Act, but the AP claimed its actions were protected by the First Amendment.
However, the Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs. In the majority opinion, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that the First Amendment:
“… rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.
“Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford nongovernmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom.
“Freedom to publish means freedom for all, and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not. Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests.”
Holland commented on the significance of the Supreme Court precedent, telling The Defender :
“The lawsuit is resting on a really strong Supreme Court precedent that basically says whether it is government censorship or it is collusive anti-competitive illegal suppression by the private sector, it’s illegal. You can’t do that.
“The AP, in its day, was very much a kind of precursor of the TNI, and it’s a very strong decision, very strong language against the Associated Press that was essentially doing the same thing back in the day.”
Noting the enormous market share held by Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, the lawsuit states, “The TNI’s Big Tech members are ‘platform gatekeepers’ in the online news market, with the power to cripple or destroy publishers by excluding them from their platforms.”
TNI’s legacy news partners took advantage of their cooperation with each other and with Big Tech, to “choke off” inconvenient narratives, the plaintiffs allege.
The lawsuit notes, for instance, that “TNI members agreed in early 2020 that their ‘ground-breaking collaboration’ would target online news relating to COVID-19 and that TNI members would ‘work together to … ensure [that] harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks’” and “jointly [combat] fraud and misinformation about the virus.”
In July 2020, the lawsuit states, “TNI ‘extended’ its collaboration to cover so-called ‘disinformation’ about the United States presidential election,” stating it was “committed to a shared early warning system of rapid alerts to combat the spread of disinformation during the U.S. presidential election.”
And in 2020 and 2021, according to the lawsuit, the BBC’s Jessica Cecil, then-head of the TNI, made a series of statements, including a claim that TNI was “the only place in the world where disinformation is discussed in real time” and that its partners sought to find “practical ways to choke off” stories and topics TNI deemed “misinformation.”
TNI’s Big Tech partnerships were imperative in these efforts, according to the lawsuit, which included as evidence several public quotes from Cecil. In 2021 for instance, Cecil stated:
“The BBC convened partners across the world in an urgent challenge: at times of highest jeopardy, when elections or lives are at stake, we asked, is there a way that the world’s biggest tech platforms from Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Microsoft and major news organisations and others … can alert each other to the most dangerous false stories, and stop them spreading fast across the internet, preventing them from doing real world harm?”
The lawsuit also noted that Cecil admitted that TNI’s members, at “closed-door” meetings and in inter-firm communications, “signed up to a clear set of expectations on how to act” regarding such “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
According to Holland, only legacy news organizations are specifically targeted as defendants in this lawsuit, explaining that Big Tech firms typically have “very serious, very binding arbitration provisions” that require legal challenges against them to be filed in the courts of northern California.
“Northern California is Silicon Valley. It’s their turf,” said Holland. “And so, we decided, in order to be able to file in a jurisdiction that we believe will be more neutral on these issues … we elected to file in Texas just against the legacy media.”
But Big Tech could still be held liable, Holland said, “because the conspiracy between legacy media and Big Tech will incorporate all of them, if there is a conspiracy [found], they’re all liable, not just those who were named as defendants.”
TNI, in concert with Big Tech, censored COVID and 2020 election narratives
According to the lawsuit, TNI’s legacy news members acted in concert with their Big Tech partners to censor a wide range of non-establishment narratives pertaining to COVID-19 and to the U.S. presidential election of 2020, stating:
“TNI members have deemed the following to be ‘misinformation’ that could not be published on the world’s dominant Internet platforms: (A) reporting that COVID may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China; (B) reporting that the COVID vaccines do not prevent infection; (C) reporting that vaccinated persons can transmit COVID to others; and (D) reporting that compromising emails and videos were found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.”
“All of the above was and is either true or, at a minimum, well within the ambit of legitimate reporting,” according to the lawsuit.
“The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.”
“Thus,” the lawsuit states, “TNI members not only suppressed competition in the online news market but deprived the public of important information on matters of the highest public concern.”
The lawsuit also alleges TNI members often knowingly removed or otherwise blocked content they knew was not false.
At a March 2022 TNI presentation, “Big Tech’s Part in the Fight,” a senior Facebook information moderation officer said “it was a mistake to think of ‘misinformation’ as consisting solely of ‘false claims,’ because a great deal of it is ‘not provably false.’”
Nevertheless, he “further emphasized the importance not only of targeting specific items of misinformation, but of ‘banning’ the sources thereof,” and stated that “Facebook works together with its ‘industry partners’ to combat ‘disinformation.’”
In emails revealed Jan. 6 as part of an ongoing lawsuit against President Biden and members of his administration alleging censorship, a memo by Meta (Facebook’s parent company) revealed efforts to reduce the visibility of CHD content, while a White House email asked for one of Kennedy’s COVID-19-related tweets to be “removed ASAP.”
The lawsuit contained a comprehensive list of “claims deemed ‘misinformation’ by one or more TNI members,” including:
- Claims that COVID-19 was manmade.
- Claims that COVID-19 was manufactured or bioengineered.
- Claims that COVID-19 was created by a government or country.
- Claims that “contradict” WHO or U.S. health officials’ guidance on the treatment, prevention, or transmission of COVID-19.
- Claims about the COVID vaccines that contradict “expert consensus” from U.S. health authorities or the WHO.
- Claims that Hydroxychloroquine (“HCQ”) is an effective treatment for COVID.
- Claims that Ivermectin (“IVM”) is an effective treatment for COVID.
- Claims that HCQ or IVM is safe to use as a treatment for COVID.
- Recommendations of the use of HCQ or IVM against COVID.
- Claims that COVID is no more dangerous to some populations than the seasonal flu.
- Claims that the mortality rate of COVID is for some populations the same or lower than that of the seasonal flu.
- Claims suggesting that the number of deaths caused by COVID is lower than official figures assert.
- Claims that face masks or mask mandates do not prevent the spread of COVID.
- Claims that wearing a face mask can make the wearer sick.
- Claims that COVID vaccines have not been approved.
- Claims that social distancing does not help prevent the spread of COVID.
- Claims that COVID-19 vaccines can kill or seriously harm people.
- Claims that the immunity from getting COVID is more effective than vaccination.
- Claims that the COVID vaccines are not effective in preventing infection.
- Claims that people who have been vaccinated against COVID can still spread the disease to others.
- Claims that the COVID vaccines are toxic or harmful or contain toxic or harmful ingredients.
- Claims that fetal cells were used in the manufacture or production of any of the COVID vaccines.
- Claims that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was found at a computer repair store in or around October 2020 or that the contents reportedly found on that laptop, including potentially compromising emails, videos, and photographs, were authentic.
“Moreover,” states the lawsuit, TNI members “publicly declared — categorically, as if it were established fact — that the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID’s origins was ‘false.’”
The lawsuit also alleges “TNI members confer and coordinate in making their censorship decisions,” noting that “TNI members’ parallel treatment of prohibited claims further evidences concerted action” by “engaging in strikingly similar viewpoint-based censorship of plausible, legitimate news reporting relating to COVID-19.”
Moreover, according to the lawsuit, “the temporal proximity” of these sanctions, including shadow bans and outright suspensions and bans, “plausibly suggests inter-firm communication and concerted action.”
The lawsuit notes that the recently released “Twitter files” provide further indication of such inter-firm communication and coordination, including “regular meetings” and “standing weekly call[s]” to “discuss censorship policies and decisions.”
According to the lawsuit, YouTube de-platformed Mercola on Sept. 29, 2021. Mercola learned about this action via a Washington Post article published that morning, although YouTube did not inform him of the decision until after the article was published.
In the lawsuit, all plaintiffs allege similar coordinated efforts at censoring their content and their social media accounts and subsequent financial damages due to being de-platformed and sustaining significant reductions to their audience size.
For instance, providing evidence of coordination ranging beyond the TNI’s members and partners, the lawsuit alleges that online payment platforms and processors such as PayPal and Stripe banned multiple plaintiffs, including CHD and Creative Destruction Media, within the same “temporal proximity” as their social media bans.
As summarized by Holland, TNI acts as “a global media monopoly”:
“They couch what they’re doing, their conspiracy to suppress independent media, i.e. the voices of dissent about election information and COVID information, as a ‘need to preserve the trust of the people’ and ‘upgrade the trust.’
“By censoring independent voices, what they’re doing is economic suppression. Antitrust is against trusts, it’s against monopolies, and what the TNI has done is essentially create a global media monopoly in the English language.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
FDA commissioners say the agency needs ways to fight online “misinformation”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | January 10, 2023
Former and current Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioners said that the agency needs partners to fight public health misinformation and that patient advocates, clinicians, industry, and academic leaders have a role to play.
The commissioners made the comments at the 2023 Innovations in Regulatory Science Summit, an event that was organized by the UCSF-Stanford Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation (CERSI).
“I actually believe that misinformation is the leading cause of death right now in the US because whether we’re looking at COVID or chronic disease, people are making bad choices driven by the information that they get,” said FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, as reported by regulatory focus. “We were just not prepared for what broad access to the internet would do to communication channels.”
Califf said that the academic community was not doing enough to combat misinformation and that their criticism of the FDA is having unintended consequences.
“As a public agency, we need to be critiqued but I think often the people that are doing the critiquing assume that the agency’s going to be there in the future in the way that they expect it to be there,” Califf said. “So, they’re critiquing it to make it better. But to a lot of unsuspecting people that hear it, it just completely erodes their belief in the institution.”
Mark McClellan, who served as an FDA commissioner from 2002 to 2004 said, “Realistically, FDA needs help.” He acknowledged that there is currently a lack of trust in public health agencies and officials. However, people still trust their doctors, community leaders, and others that are “close to their experience.”
Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member who served as a commissioner from 2017 to 2019, said the fast response to misinformation is crucial and touted the idea of allowing the industry to counter misinformation about products.
“We’ve seen FDA weigh in, admirably, around some dangerous disinformation on specific products,” he said. “But that can’t be the business of the FDA.”
He suggested that the FDA should create a limited safe harbor to allow sponsors to directly counter misinformation. He added that the FDA would determine how and what the sponsors can respond to.
“I think sponsors need to have the ability to defend their products in the marketplace of ideas when there’s true misinformation,” Gottlieb said.
Gottlieb was under fire this week after it was revealed that Gottlieb had been flagging tweets to Twitter.
In the August 27, 2021 email, which was published by journalist Alex Berenson, Gottlieb complained to Todd O’Boyle, a senior manager on Twitter’s Public Policy team, about a tweet that claimed natural immunity to Covid-19 was superior to vaccine immunity.

“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. “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.”
COVID mRNA “Vaccine” Safety Unravels As Scale Of Dangerous Side Effects Becomes Glaring
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | January 10, 2023
Nowadays, as the collateral damage mounts, you’d have to be pretty damn dense not to see how things have gone awry with respect to the mRNA medicines.
As recent reports, studies and data indicate, it’s likely going to be even worse than the worst imaginable worst-case scenarios. An increasing number of physicians fear these rushed medicines are killing far more, perhaps millions more, than they’re saving.
Recent sudden and unexpected collapses
Since an NFL player and a Canadian reporter collapsed before millions of viewers on television, faith in the new mRNA medicines is eroding faster than a falling house of cards.
Already a recent Rasmussen survey showed that almost half of all Americans “believe the vaccines may be causing unexplained deaths, and one quarter of respondents said they knew someone whose death could potentially be linked to receiving a vaccine.”
Germany sees 19% excess mortality in December, 2022
Countries worldwide are reporting shocking “excess mortality” numbers since the vaccines were introduced in earnest in early 2021.
For example, the German Federal Statistics Office has found that the number of deaths in Germany has increased by more than 35,000 cases compared to the previous year and that in December, 2022, deaths were 19% higher than the comparable figure for the previous four years.
If the deadliest pandemic in centuries was overcome in 2022 by the great curative vaccination, then why did so many more people die in 2022, of all years? Naturally this makes no sense and so people have grown highly suspicious and distrustful of the experimental medicine.
Millions of people are refusing further boosters
It’s little wonder vaccine hesitancy has reached a new peak high as citizens are refusing to let themselves be boostered again. Switzerland, for example, reports that it will have to throw away millions of doses.
In Germany, a vast majority of citizens have opted not to take an additional booster. So far, less than 20% have taken 4 shots.
Less than 15 million Germans have taken the 4th jab
There’s a growing sense that the public has been grossly misled by the pharmaceutical companies and the authorities. Trust is at an all time low.
To make matters worse, high profile British physician Dr. John Campbell showed us that according to data tabulated from a recent major published paper, people catch COVID more often if they received more mRNA jabs. A growing number of experts suspect that the mRNA vaccines are damaging the body’s immune system, possibly irreversibly, rather than strengthening it.
Realization of being duped, damaged
Even hard leftists like Bill Maher have lost trust in the medical industry with respect to COVID and the “vaccines” and are now also beginning to slam widespread government-promoted Big Social Media censorship.
The tide is turning as once steadfast vaccination proponents realize they’ve been duped and damaged. It’s just a matter of time, possibly just weeks, before criminal investigations are launched to get to the bottom of it all and criminal arrests made.
German public health expert and physician, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, even suggests people should not take any more vaccines of any kind until the whole mess gets cleared up and the system repaired. “They can’t be trusted.”
Twitter censored tweets after pressure from Pfizer director
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 9, 2023
A newly released email from the Twitter Files has revealed that Twitter censored a tweet from Dr. Brett Giroir, a board member at the biopharmaceutical company Altesa Biosciences, after it was flagged by Scott Gottlieb, a board member at the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.
Gottlieb and Giroir both currently serve on the boards of several pharmaceutical companies and have backgrounds in public health. Gottlieb is a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner while Giroir is a former Assistant Secretary for Health and former acting Commissioner of the FDA.
Pfizer produces Covid vaccines whereas Altesa Biosciences develops drugs to combat Covid.
In the August 27, 2021 email, which was published by journalist Alex Berenson, Gottlieb complained to Todd O’Boyle, a senior manager on Twitter’s Public Policy team, about a tweet from Giroir that claimed natural immunity to Covid-19 was superior to vaccine immunity.
“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. “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.”
According to Berenson, O’Boyle forwarded Gottlieb’s email to Twitter’s Strategic Response team — a team that was tasked with handling complaints from Twitter’s most important employees and users.
Berenson said that O’Boyle didn’t mention that Gottlieb was a Pfizer board member in this email and instead wrote, “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.”
An analyst from Twitter’s Strategic Response team quickly found that the tweet didn’t violate any of Twitter’s “misinformation” rules, according to Berenson. However, the tweet was still slapped with a “Misleading” label and had its replies, shares, and likes disabled after Gottlieb’s complaint.

This label and the restrictions still haven’t been removed, even though several high-ranking health officials, such as former White House Covid response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, have since questioned the effectiveness of Covid vaccines when it comes to preventing infections.
Berenson also claimed that one week later, on September 3, 2021, Gottlieb complained about a tweet from Covid lockdown and vaccine skeptic Justin Hart.
The Hart tweet that Gottlieb reportedly complained about stated: “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.”
Berenson alleged that Gottlieb complained about this tweet when the Pfizer Covid vaccine “would soon be approved for children 5 to 11.”
However, Berenson said that this time, Twitter refused to act.
Previous Twitter email releases have revealed that during the same month that Gottlieb was complaining about Giroir’s tweet, he also flagged one of Berenson’s articles to Twitter. Berenson was temporarily suspended from Twitter days after Gottlieb flagged his article.
Gottlieb responded to the revelations about him flagging Giroir’s tweet by claiming that the publication of this email was a “selective disclosure” of his “private communications with Twitter” and that it had stoked “the threat environment” and instigated “more menacing dialogue, with potentially serious consequences.”
Giroir accused Gottlieb of scheming with Twitter to “apparently put corporate interests first not public health.”
Dramatic figures link more Covid jabs with more illness
By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | January 9, 2023
A nurse friend who did not want to hear when I first questioned Covid jab safety two years ago is now furious about having been bludgeoned by the NHS into having three shots. She survived the first two but had massive bleeding after the third. Looking more deeply into the data, she found to her horror that the ‘safe and effective’ claim is completely unfounded.
I suspect there are hundreds of thousands of other healthcare workers feeling the same sense of betrayal, and that this is contributing in a major way to the current staffing crisis.
My friend’s experience is exactly in line with new figures from Australia showing a dramatic dose-response relationship between the number of jabs and the risk of having to go into hospital with Covid or dying from it.
The New South Wales (NSW) data, for the two weeks ending December 31, are a rarity in that they include vaccination status.
Out of 1,415 hospitalised patients where this status was known, ten had received a single dose, 218 two doses, 377 three doses and 810 four doses. There were zero hospital admissions for Covid among the unvaccinated, who comprise 13 per cent of the NSW population.
Deaths followed a similar pattern except that six unvaccinated people were reported as having died of Covid. None was in hospital, raising the possibility that their diagnosis was assumed rather than confirmed.
Only one patient died who had received a single jab. Nine deaths were in those who had received two doses, and 19 in the triple-jabbed. The figure then shot up to 53 in those who had four shots.
Businessman and mathematician Igor Chudov, reporting here on the NSW findings, acknowledges that the figures will be skewed by differences in how many people have had the different number of shots. After adjusting for those differences, however, he finds that the four-times-jabbed have a four times increased risk of hospitalisation compared with those who had two shots.
While some of this may be further explained by age differences, with older people being given more shots, Chudov concludes that the data show the Covid vaccines to be an ‘utter failure’.
He notes that a year ago, the NSW health minister Brad Hazzard declared: ‘There is no question that we will NOT get out of this pandemic without a very substantial portion of our population being vaccinated.’
That ‘substantial portion’ – 84.3 per cent – has been achieved. But even in Australia’s mid-summer, the country is in the middle of another Covid wave. And it is the unvaccinated who are at zero risk of being ill enough to have to go into hospital, in NSW at least.
Further evidence of the failure of the vaccine drive, Chudov notes, is that deaths overall in Australia are running at about a fifth higher than usual.
‘What awaits Australia in 2023? We do not know, and Covid proved everyone’s past predictions wrong. I cannot see how these endless waves of Covid will end when people’s immunity worldwide is unset by reckless vaccinations [see here and here].
‘The only thing I know is that if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. I hope that Australians will soon stop taking Covid vaccines.’
They will not be helped in that by the NSW health authority, which has decided to drop vaccination status from its weekly reports, as from December 31.
It says the data were included from 2021, when vaccines were first rolled out, ‘to monitor trends in the relationship between vaccination and outcomes’. But now most of the population have received at least two jabs, and with timing differences between booster doses, ‘the trends between vaccines and outcomes cannot be interpreted’.
A similar, convenient inability to interpret unfavourable data has occurred in the UK, as pointed out last month in a detailed analysis by Amanuensis, pen-name for an ex-academic and senior government adviser who contributes regularly to the Daily Sceptic. He or she wrote: ‘It wasn’t until early September 2021 that the UKHSA [UK Health Security Agency] started to include actual vaccine surveillance data in the Vaccine Surveillance Report. I’ve often wondered why they started to offer these data, as even in that September report the data didn’t support the “vaccines are good” narrative.
‘My favourite theory is that someone in authority, ignorant of the complexities of the immune system (that’s the vast majority of those in authority, if not all of them), demanded that the data be included to show the population how well the vaccines were bound to be performing.’
The data first presented were troubling, showing higher rates of Covid in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated for those aged over 40. The UKHSA included a small paragraph ‘to remind readers that you mustn’t simply look at the data and infer how well the vaccines are doing.
‘However, data based on population-wide testing tends to at least offer a strong indication of what is really going on. The real-world data . . . were highly suggestive of a problem that should have been prioritised for rigorous investigation, not explained away with the flick of a pen.’
Six reports later, the situation had deteriorated, with rates in the vaccinated higher than in the unvaccinated for all those aged over 30, and much higher rates for those aged 40-60.
The agency stopped publishing ‘helpful’ charts, presumably because they made it too easy to interpret how bad things were getting, Amanuensis says.
They continued to publish raw data for a while, but with ever more text on the dangers of interpreting the figures ‘at face value’, and eventually a stern warning that the data should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness.
‘The last set of data on infection rates strongly suggested that the vaccines were significantly increasing the risk of infection with Covid. Of course, the UKHSA were keen to suggest that the differences seen between vaccinated and unvaccinated infection rates were actually due to . . . well, anything that they could think of that wasn’t the vaccines . . .
‘The UKHSA authors were right to point out some potential reasons for the very high incidence of Covid in the vaccinated population, but they left one potential reason out: that they had used a poorly tested vaccine that might have resulted in an increase in the risk of infection.
‘To include this potential reason would have been supported by prior research into candidate vaccines for coronaviruses (including SARS and MERS). Alas, we’ve gone far beyond the realms of “trust the science” and it is clear that no one in authority is allowed to even whisper the potential for the vaccines to have made things worse.
‘We’re now nine months from that last table of real world data on Covid infection by vaccination status, and in the meantime studies from around the world continue to suggest that the vaccines increase the risk of Covid infection.’
The most recent, from the US state of Ohio, showed disease risk significantly correlated with number of vaccine doses given. Health workers who received three shots were approximately three times more likely to get infected with the Omicron variant, compared with the unvaccinated.
Amanuensis writes: ‘Perhaps if the UKHSA had been more interested in having an open mind compared with its “it’s anything but the vaccines” attitude towards the data it presented there might have been more caution taken with the vaccine rollout. As a consequence we might currently be seeing far fewer than one in 20 of the population concurrently infected with Covid.’
One glimmer of hope: my nurse friend says that whereas everyone at her hospital was bullied into receiving booster doses up to the third shot, the pressure has now stopped over fourth doses and beyond. At least hospital staff, it seems, are recognising the real-world data that regulators still wish to hide.
These Doctors Pushed Masking, Covid Lockdowns on Twitter. Turns Out, They Don’t Exist
By Matthew Kupfer • The Standard • December 13, 2022
Last month, Dr. Robert Honeyman lost their sister to Covid. They wrote about it on Twitter and received dozens of condolences, over 4,000 retweets and 43,000 likes.
Exactly one month later, on Dec. 12, Honeyman wrote that another tragedy had befallen their family.
“Sad to announce that my husband has entered a coma after being in hospital with Covid. The doctor is unsure if he will come out,” they tweeted. “This year has been the toughest of my life losing my sister to this virus. This is the first time in my life I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel.”
Again, the condolences and well-wishes rolled in. But there was a problem: Honeyman wasn’t real.
The transgender “Doctor of Sociology and Feminist studies” with a “keen interest in poetry” who used they/them pronouns was, in fact, a stock photo described on DepositPhotos, a royalty-free image site, as “Smiling happy, handsome latino man outside—headshot portrait.”
Their supposedly comatose husband, Dr. Patrick C. Honeyman, was also fake. His Twitter photo had been stolen from an insurance professional in Wayne, Indiana.

The stock photo used as Dr. Robert Honeyman’s avatar on Twitter. (Screenshot)

The photograph used as Dr. Patrick C. Honeyman’s avatar on Twitter. (Screenshot)
The two fake doctors, whose accounts urged extreme caution about Covid-19, were part of a network of at least four fake accounts that touted their ties to the LGBTQ+ community, vocally advocated for mask-wearing and social distancing, and dished out criticism to those they felt were not taking the pandemic seriously.
The Honeymans could not be reached for comment, as they do not exist. At publication time, Robert Honeyman’s account was no longer active.
The fake doctors were uncovered by Joshua Gutterman Tranen, a self-described “gay writer” pursuing a master’s of fine arts at Bennington College. He saw Robert Honeyman’s tweet about their husband being in a coma, noticed people he followed also followed them, and thought that they might be part of the LGBTQ+ academic community.
But after 10 minutes of googling, Gutterman Tranen concluded that Robert Honeyman’s photo was a stock image and their biography stretched boundaries of believability: an academic who left no traces on academic websites and had lost two family members to Covid in late 2022, despite masking and distancing.
The character looked like “liberal Mad Libs,” Gutterman Tranen said.
“I’m a self-identified leftist, and I understand that people have a lot of different identities, but it felt concocted in the lab about how many identities and horrible experiences can we put on one person,” he said.

The Standard ran Dr. Robert Honeyman’s Twitter photo through a Google reverse image search and found that it was a widely available stock photo. (Screenshot)
It is unclear who created the two doctors, but their bios and personas signpost identities meant to appeal to a certain type of Twitter denizen: liberal, pro-diversity and concerned about Covid. Or meant to provoke the opposite of that type of person.
Both doctors present themselves as members of the LGBTQ+ community. Robert displayed the trans and Ukrainian flags in their Twitter name. Patrick had a rainbow flag in his bio.
Robert wrote openly about suffering from MPX, an infectious disease that caused San Francisco to declare a state of emergency earlier this year and had largely spread among men who have sex with men. “Don’t believe what the media have been sharing. […] it’s a horrible disease that has had me bed ridden,” they tweeted in July. They also claimed to have been the victim of a transphobic attack in October. […]
All four accounts urged caution about Covid. They also amplified the voices of other Twitter users calling on the public to mask, vaccinate and socially distance. At times, they criticized policies that they felt undermined pandemic safety and individuals who they believed did not take Covid seriously enough.
But as Twitter users responded to Gutterman Tranen’s thread on the Honeymans, they also discovered the accounts expressing views that appeared implausible.
“Come on china! Stop protesting, I wish we had similar lockdown measures here,” Robert Honeyman wrote in a Nov. 27 tweet. … Full article
UK Gov’t Whistleblower Reveals Massive Spike in Excess Deaths Since COVID Jab Rollout, More Than 1000 a Week
By Jamie White | InfoWars | January 7, 2023
A UK government whistleblower has come forward to reveal there’s been a massive spike of excess deaths since the rollout of the COVID-19 “vaccines.”
James Wells, a former European Parliament MEP and senior member of the UK Office for National Statistics, joined Nigel Farage on GB News this week to explain how the COVID mortality data is being suppressed by the government.
“These excess deaths have been going on since May, the average is at about 1,000 a week,” Wells said on Monday.
“The reason we can’t ignore it, is it’s across all age groups and particularly in the young. We’re seeing 10 to 15 percent excess deaths in the age group between 24 and 59,” he said, adding that “heart attacks, heart conditions” that are behind these deaths.
Wells went on to say that the UK government has been trying to blame the excess deaths on “ambulance delays” and diagnoses going unchecked from missed checkups.
“You can explain maybe a little bit of movement on the dial, but you can’t explain 1,000 a week from that. It’s ridiculous. To be honest, it’s an insult to our intelligence. And there’s no evidence to back it up,” Wells said.
Wells called for “an independent public inquiry” into the excess deaths, saying that he’s “posing the question” that the COVID jabs may be responsible.
“These are young, healthy people that are dying. And at the moment it seems that the government- all they’re doing is scrabbling around and saying, ‘it might be this, it might be that,’” he said.
“If you account for all of this, there is data emerging across the world now which is showing a link between the vaccines, particularly the mRNA vaccines, and heart issues,” he added.
Wells also added he no longer trusts the UK government, citing their quiet withdrawal of the harmful Astra Zeneca vaccine.
Top insurance research analyst Josh Stirling echoed Wells’ concerns last month, noting that all-cause mortality rose in 2022 from 2021 by about 15%.
Bitchute
Internal CDC Emails Claim Assistant Secretary For Health Blocked Release Of Fluoride Review
By Derrick Broze | The Last American Vagabond | January 5, 2023
Newly released emails reveal that leadership within the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institute of Health acted to prevent the release of a long-delayed review of fluoride’s toxicity by the National Toxicology Program. The emails specifically claim that Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine intervened to stop the release of the NTP review, also known internally as a monograph.
An email dated June 3rd, 2022, shows Nicole Johnson, Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships and Strategic Communication in CDC’s Oral Health Division contacting Jennifer Greaser, a Senior Public Health Policy Analyst in CDC’s Washington office. Johnson states:
“The latest we heard (yesterday) is that ASH Levine has put the report on hold until further notice.”
ASH Levine refers to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine.
The emails were released as part of the ongoing legal dispute between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and plaintiffs Food and Water Watch, the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), and others who are seeking an end to water fluoridation Throughout the historic lawsuit the plaintiffs have argued that the practice violates the EPA’s Toxic Substances Abuse Act.
Hearings for the lawsuit began in June 2020, but were delayed for more than two years after U.S. District Court Judge Edward Chen put the proceedings on hold pending the release of the NTP’s review of all of the available research on fluoride. The NTP had previously claimed the review would be available in May 2022. However, the review has not been made public and hearings have been delayed and rescheduled as the judge awaited the NTP’s conclusions.
In late October 2022, Judge Chen ended the two year stay on the lawsuit when he ruled that the NTP review could be viewed in its unpublished form to better inform his final decision. However, due to concerns from the EPA, Judge Chen ruled that the report could not be made public unless the NTP releases it.
On December 14, 2022, the plaintiff’s filed several exhibits with Judge Chen, including a redacted version of the NTP’s assessment of fluoride’s neurotoxicity and internal emails between the CDC and the NTP which were obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests.
What do the #FluorideEmails reveal?
Michael Connett, attorney for the plaintiffs, outlined the findings of the emails in several exhibits submitted to Judge Chen. “These emails confirm that the NTP considered the May 2022 monograph to be the NTP’s final report,” Connett writes. “They also confirm that the CDC was opposed to the NTP releasing the report, and that leadership at the top levels of the Department of Health Human Services intervened to stop the report from being released.”
As Connett notes, on April 28, 2022, Dr. Mary Wolfe, the Director of NTP’s Office of Policy, Review and Outreach, emailed Casey Hannan, the Director of CDC’s Division of Oral Health, and stated that the NTP’s “analysis and conclusions are set”. Dr. Wolfe also let Hannan know that the NTP had reviewed the CDC’s submitted comments, but still planned to release the review “mid/late May” 2022.
In a May 11, 2022 email, Wolfe again notifies Hannan and the CDC that the NTP has “set May 18, 2022 for publication of the monograph. The monograph will be posted to the NTP website, and we will email a notice of the posting to NTP listserv subscribers.”
However, later that day and the following day, Dr. Karen Hacker, the Director of CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP), tells Dr. Wolfe that there is concern within the CDC about publishing the NTP review without an additional review by “NIH leadership”. Hacker also asked about the potential of a “interagency review” by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Dr. Wolfe subsequently told the CDC that “we (the NTP) believe the current findings, as stated in the monograph, reflect the scope of our evaluation and the available scientific literature and no revision is needed”.
Meanwhile, while Dr. Wolfe was defending the work of the NTP, internal emails among officials at the CDC’s Division of Oral Health reveal that the CDC was already preparing to prevent the release. A May 12, 2022 email from Hannan states:
“The May 18th release date for [the monograph] is almost certainly not going to happen. OASH and NIH OD are pretty clearly going to get more involved.”
OASH is a reference to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health, the second highest office in the Department of Health and Human Services, while NIH OD refers to the NIH’s Office of the Director, the highest office within the NIH. The current Director of the NIH is Lawrence A. Tabak.
Jay Sanders, Education & Outreach Director with the Fluoride Action Network, told The Last American Vagabond he believes the emails “reveal a concerted effort at the highest level of the U.S. public health bureaucracy to squash a key report on fluoride neurotoxicity”. Sanders also stated the emails “show the lengths these agencies are willing to go to to protect their pet project, fluoridation, from any scientific scrutiny.”
Together with the June 3rd, 2022 email, these communications point to direct intervention from the head of the NIH and the Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The emails confirm what has long been suspected. Namely, that government officials at some level were preventing the release of this important review on the toxicity of fluoride. The CDC interference comes on top of an already unusual process employed by the NTP to evaluate the data on the safety of water fluoridation.
“This report, which has now been reviewed 4 times, is now going to be reviewed a 5th time by the NTP,” Fluoride Action Network attorney Michael Connett stated during the October 2022 hearing. “There will be at least 5 separate peer review processes extending over 4 years. This is, to put it mildly, exceptionally unusual.”
The next hearing in the #FluorideLawsuit takes place on January 12, 2023 at 2:30 PM US Eastern.
A deal with the devil of Moderna
By Edward Fitzgibbon | TCW Defending Freedom | January 4, 2023
A press release slipped out just before Christmas on the government website outlines, in the banal bureaucratese of such documents, a truly dreadful lurch towards medical totalitarianism.
A ten-year ‘partnership’ has been ‘cemented between Moderna and the UK government’ to produce up to 250million doses of mRNA vaccine in a purpose-built plant to start construction this year. There has been no discussion whatever in Parliament about the wisdom of such a step.
Announcing it on December 22, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Steve Barclay said: ‘This time two years ago, the UK was the first country in the world to administer a Covid vaccine outside of a clinical trial. Since then, countless lives have been saved across the world and more than 150million doses have been given in the UK alone.
‘It is vital we invest in fighting future variants of this disease as well as other deadly viruses that are circulating, such as seasonal flu and RSV, and this partnership with Moderna will also strengthen our ability to respond to any future pandemics.’
Richard Torbett, Chief Executive, Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) said: ‘This partnership is fantastic news for British manufacturing and UK-based science and research.’
The deal will include running clinical trials in the UK and Moderna will fund grants for UK universities, including PhD places and research programmes.
It was initialled last June, when then Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: ‘We are bringing supercharged, homegrown vaccines right to our shores . . . Our investment will guarantee jabs in arms against some of the toughest viruses out there, bringing us to the forefront of the fight against future threats. We’ve all seen what vaccines can do, and today’s partnership brings us one step closer to finding cures for some of the most devastating diseases.’
On the same occasion the then Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid said: ‘mRNA is a truly transformational technology and we have seen its life-saving power during the pandemic.’
The aim, replicating with terrible predictability the hugely profitable Covid playbook, is to ‘go from variant to vaccine in 100 days’. The usual gagging orders on details of this deal-with-the-devil are in place ‘for reasons of commercially sensitivity’. After all, they wouldn’t want us to find out who is in line to profit. A veritable money-tsunami is on the way.
Readers may recall a 2020 article in the Guardian in which Rishi Sunak, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘refused to say if he’d profit from a Moderna partnership’. This, in spite of the fact that he was a founding partner of the Theleme group, registered in the tax haven of the Caymans, which at that time had a £500million investment in Moderna. Sunak left the firm in 2013, and it is not known whether he retained any investment in the Theleme fund.



