Censorship persists despite an increase in information lending credibility to Covid-19 vaccine concerns.
Twitter temporarily censored Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo last Sunday for a tweet suggesting men aged 18-39 should not get the Covid vaccine due to increased risk of cardiac-related death.
A Florida Department of Health analysis released Oct. 7 found an 84 percent increase in cardiac-related death among males in that age range after taking the vaccine.
Twitter also suspended leading cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough last week. McCullough has been vocal in his criticism of the censorship of early treatment options and potential problems with the vaccine, speaking out on a Senate panel and on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) responded to McCullough’s suspension on Twitter.
“To say private companies have this right is to ignore their coordination with government censors, and the undisclosed influence they have on elections,” Massie said.
Massie’s statement touches on documented government attempts to influence public perceptions of Covid, without clear consideration of whether or not opposing views had validity.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) records obtained by Judicial Watch in October showed plans for an extensive advertising campaign involving entertainment icons, media, major league sports, social platforms, and more to promote the vaccine.
Campaign proposals targeted nearly every demographic. Potential ideas included a Christian Broadcast Network “vaccination special,” producing question and answer videos “featuring local Black doctors discussing the vaccines,” connecting with social media influencers to create “funny and/or musical videos” about vaccination, including vaccine messaging in scripted reality TV shows, asking Tom Brady to create a video with his parents encouraging vaccination, and even placing “a trusted messenger on the Joe Rogan Show.”
“These records show a disturbing and massive campaign by the Biden administration to propagandize and politicize the controversial COVID vaccine,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement. “It seems as if the entire entertainment industry was an agent for the government!”
Busy producing propaganda, they failed to confirm the accuracy of their message. With the exception of a few, such as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), government officials did not invite scientists with dissenting views to defend their perspective or ask questions about official agency positions.
Rather, federal officials spent the last two years meddling in the matters of private social media companies, communications documents from 11 government agencies obtained by the New Civil Liberties Alliance revealed.
Along with actively encouraging platforms to censor information relating to Covid-19, agencies held weekly meetings with companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter to discuss issues like “information sharing around elections risk, briefs from industry, threat updates, and highlights and upcoming watch outs.”
Censorship has now grown beyond Big Tech. A bill signed into law early this month by California Governor Gavin Newsom, AB 2098, means government censorship of medical professionals is now legal and openly encouraged in the state.
AB 2098 empowers the Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California to “take action” against any licensed physician or surgeon who disseminates COVID-19 misinformation on the grounds of “unprofessional conduct.”
Potential actions include revoking the offender’s license. In Section 1(f), the bill cites a July 2021 statement by the Federation of State Medical Boards that warned physicians who spread vaccine misinformation that they risk “the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”
Misinformation, as defined by the bill, means statements contradicted by “contemporary scientific consensus.”
In a statement, Newsom said he signed the law because it is “narrowly tailored to apply only to those egregious instances in which a licensee is acting with malicious intent or clearly deviating from the required standard of care while interacting directly with a patient under their care.”
But the bill’s “contemporary scientific consensus” standard is anything but narrow. Consensus once repudiated claims now making headlines in The Washington Post, such as a recent story on a study showing that COVID-19 vaccines can affect periods.
Women discussing irregularities in their menstrual cycle was one of the pieces of “misinformation” federal officials sought to censor from social platforms, as were other vaccine side effects and rumors of vaccine passports.
When the CDC revised its guidelines in August, it finally acknowledged—after repeatedly denying—the reality of natural immunity and existence of breakthrough infections among the vaccinated.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky even admitted the agency made mistakes, saying they “did not reliably meet expectations.”
In a video shown to CDC staff, Walensky reportedly said “we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes — from testing, to data, to communications,” according to Bloomberg.
Bills like California’s AB 2098 make it evident government officials have not taken these mistakes as warning signs. Even when censorship has come to light, they’ve reverted to damage control instead of allowing the truth to be hashed out through scientific studies, public debate, and investigation.