New Emails Show Biden Administration Actively Censored "True Content" About COVID Vaccines With An Army of Federal Censors

It may seem like a “duh” moment for many, but for what could very well be the majority of people out there, the perception that any ‘negative’ information pertaining to COVID vaccines was the product of “misinformation,” “fake news,” or a “conspiracy theory” still reigns true.

That’s why it’s so important to continue to share information like this, and keep supporting those who do it.

Legitimate safety and efficacy issues regarding COVID vaccines have been raised throughout the pandemic by thousands of experts all over the world, only to go mostly unheard. You can see some examples I’ve written about in the past here, and here.

Some CDC, FDA, and NIH officials have even openly expressed that they are embarrassed by the lack of science that has guided COVID vaccine policy.

New emails released during litigation against the Biden administration reveal incredible efforts to silence the concerns of many scientists, doctors, journalists and other experts in the field.

The lawsuit shows that the White House pressured Facebook to control information that might harm Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine policy. Facebook obviously complied.

Emails show that a Facebook employee emailed White House officials Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, detailing how the social media giant would reduce the virality of vaccine stories that might discourage the administration’s vaccine policies, like vaccine mandates, even if they contained “true content.”

One of the emails reads as follows,

“As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation. This is often true content…”

The lawsuit against the Biden administration was initiated by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, who is suing the federal government along with the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana.

It is believed that the US government is breaking the First Amendment by coercing, forcing, and pressuring companies to censor people for expressing views which the government disapproves of.

Flaherty's emails are simply one of many examples that demonstrate how the Biden administration intentionally sought to suppress true content that it believed threatened the administrations agenda.

“Emails made public through earlier lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act requests and Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files had already exposed a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. The government directed tech companies to remove certain types of material and even to censor specific posts and accounts. Again, these included truthful messages casting doubt on the efficacy of masks and challenging Covid-19 vaccine mandates.”

— Jean Younes, litigation counsel at New Civil Liberties Alliance

Even well before this, an article published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) by journalist Laurie Clarke in May 2021 revealed that Facebook had already removed at least 16 million pieces of content from its platform and added warnings to approximately 167 million others. So, it appears that Big Tech companies like Facebook have been in cahoots with governments for quite some time.

Throughout the pandemic, fact-checkers have not really been fact-checking, but rather narrative checking. Social media has been one of the many long arms of the government to enforce their narrative control tactics.

Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya

Almost impossible to overstate how wrong so many news corporations were on the science of covid: - lab leak as conspiracy - efficacy of lockdown - harmlessness of school closures - recovered immunity - toddler masking - vax mandates A perfect record of anti- science failure.

There are countless examples of “true content” being censored. For example, the BMJ ran a story proving that Pfizer falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial for COVID vaccines.

Health agencies still have not investigated this matter.

Facebook removed this BMJ story from its platform and labelled it as “false” news and “missing context.”

The BMJ criticized the fact checkers as “inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.”

Here at The Pulse, we also had our reporting on the BMJ piece removed, including many accurate stories throughout COVID. In fact, we began experiencing this censorship in 2016. As a result we went from a thriving independent media organization to now struggling to stay afloat financially. Thankfully the world has become much more aware of just how vast and coordinated censorship efforts are during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are grateful for those who support us through either paid or free subscriptions here on Substack. We hope to continue doing what we do and sustain ourselves with your continued support.

Tight Collusion & The Revolving Door

The cosy and corrupt relationship between Big Tech and social media companies like Facebook seems to have been constantly revealed throughout the pandemic, not just with this new release of emails from the Biden administration.

Tech companies – including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft and LinkedIn – met with the FBI and other government agencies every month, before and since the 2020 election to talk about this. Facebook even set up a special portal for “takedowns” that requires a law enforcement email to access.

Before the 2020 election, Big Tech companies also met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives.

In fact, last year the US Department of Homeland Security stated that sharing “misinformation” online may be considered domestic terrorism. Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified 10 months ago that the Department of Homeland Security has created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to combat misinformation. Thankfully they scrapped this project, or did they? Perhaps it’s “classified” to protect “national security.”

This is not anything new,

“The CIA was directing the coverage of American news organizations, overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely to benefit a favoured corporation), establishing propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects (purportedly contributing to the creation of the Unabomber), and—gasp—interfering with foreign elections. From there, it was a short hop to wiretapping journalists and compiling files on Americans who opposed its wars.”

- NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden, “America’s Open Wound. The CIA is not your friend.”

A declassified document from the CIA archives from 1991 in the form of a letter from a CIA task force addressed to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency details the close relationship that exists between the CIA and mainstream media and academia.

I’ve mentioned this in several articles. The document states that the CIA task force “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation,” and that “this has helped us turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success’ stories.”

This more recent New Civil Liberties Alliance lawsuit also discovered that federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress speech that the government disfavoured.

“The discovery provided so far demonstrates that this Censorship Enterprise is extremely broad, including officials in the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General; and evidently other agencies as well, such as the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the US Election Assistance Commission. And it rises to the highest levels of the US Government, including numerous White House officials.”

— Aaron Kheriaty, former Professor of Psychiatry at the UCI School of Medicine and Director, Medical Ethics at UCI Health, is a Senior Scholar of the Brownstone Institute.

Furthermore, Big Tech companies have dozens of high ranking employees that were once employed by various Federal agencies.

For example, Aaron Berman the, Senior Product Policy Manager for Misinformation at Meta, left his job at the CIA as senior analytic manager a 2019 to join Meta. There are a number of other ex-CIA agents working in these fields.

Keith Alexander, director of the NSA under Barack Obama now works for Amazon. Regina Dugan, who was the Director of The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 2009 to 2012 held executive positions at both Google and Facebook after that.

Deborah Berman spent 10 years as a data and intelligence analyst at the CIA before recently being brought on as a trust and safety project manager for Meta.

Between 2006 and 2010, Bryan Weisbard was a CIA intelligence officer, his job entailing, in his own words, leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations,” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns”. After that he became a diplomat and is currently a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta.

Emily Vacher, who Facebook/Meta recruited to be a director of trust and safety, worked at the FBI from 2001 to 2011, becoming a supervisory special agent.

Sherif Kamal, trust and safety program manager at Meta, worked as a program manager at the Pentagon until 2020.

There are literally countless examples and it’s quite shocking just how many there are.

“In secret, these companies had all agreed to work with the U.S. Government far beyond what the law required of them, and that’s what we’re seeing with this new censorship push is really a new direction in the same dynamic. These companies are not obligated by the law to do almost any of what they’re actually doing but they’re going above and beyond, to, in many cases, to increase the depth of their relationship (with the government) and the government’s willingness to avoid trying to regulate them in the context of their desired activities, which is ultimately to dominate the conversation and information space of global society in different ways…They’re trying to make you change your behaviour.

I think the reality here is…it’s not really about freedom of speech, and it’s not really about protecting people from harm…I think what you see is the internet has become the de facto means of mass communication. That represents influence which represents power, and what we see is we see a whole number of different tribes basically squabbling to try to gain control over this instrument of power.”

– Edward Snowden

Final Thoughts

Independent media is crucially important right now. As Facebook, Google and other corporations strip funding from organizations like us, our reach stops, our work slows down, and the propaganda voices of the mainstream get louder. This is the agenda at work.

This is also why we moved to Substack. The platform allows us to fund our work and reach YOU, our community, with our work. We now rely much less on Big Tech.

This is a time for us to come together and truly choose which direction we go forward in. Not only do we have to choose our media carefully, but I believe we must also work to improve our overall sensemaking processes. If we cannot make sense of what is going on around us reliably, how can we make good decisions?

The good thing is, the more censorship efforts increase, it creates an equal and opposite reaction within the “mainstream” and acts as a catalyst for more people to really see what’s happening, and question what’s going on.

Certain nefarious actions by government, although hard to stop, are always done under the guise of good will, backed by massive propaganda campaigns that attract the support of many. The way things are going, governments and mainstream media organizations continue to lose support, rapidly.