The Trump administration has settled with journalist Alex Berenson over the Biden White House’s role in getting him banned from Twitter during the summer of 2021.
The settlement includes a payment and a written admission that “the Government did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantial coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.”
Not “encouraged.” Not “suggested.” The federal government put its name on a document saying it silenced a journalist because it didn’t like what he was saying about COVID-19 vaccines. Berenson’s lawyer, James Lawrence, believes this is the first time an individual American has received a cash payment to resolve a lawsuit over government coercion of social media companies.
Berenson, a former New York Times reporter, had spent much of 2021 questioning the efficacy and safety of the mRNA Covid vaccines on Twitter, where he had roughly 300,000 followers.
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Internal documents later obtained through discovery and the Twitter Files showed that in April 2021, Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to Biden’s COVID response team, called Berenson “the epicenter of disinformation” in a meeting with Twitter staff. The administration wanted to know why Berenson was still allowed to tweet.
The pressure didn’t stop with the government. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner sitting on Pfizer’s board, was running his own campaign to get inconvenient voices off the platform.
Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 in 2021, a year the company pulled in roughly $81 billion in revenue, nearly half from mRNA vaccines. Gottlieb had a direct line to Todd O’Boyle, Twitter’s senior policy manager and its point of contact with the White House.
When a tweet from Dr. Brett Giroir noted that natural immunity appeared superior to vaccine immunity, Gottlieb emailed O’Boyle, calling it “corrosive” and warning it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage.”
O’Boyle forwarded the complaint internally with the note, “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.” The tweet was labeled “misleading,” and users were blocked from sharing it.
A pharmaceutical company’s board member was using the same White House lobbyist the government used to flag posts for censorship. The financial incentive is not subtle.
On August 28, 2021, Berenson posted the tweet that got him permanently banned. “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”
Because of this tweet, Twitter wiped his account. According to the lawsuit, it was Gottlieb’s appeal to O’Boyle about this tweet that pushed the ban through on a Saturday night. The claim that mRNA vaccines don’t stop infection or transmission is now widely accepted, including by the CDC. The tweet that got Berenson banned turned out to be accurate.
The settlement releases the federal government from the case but leaves claims against Gottlieb and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla intact. Bourla met with Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, the same week Twitter issued Berenson a third strike. Bourla has described people who spread what he called vaccine misinformation as “criminals” who “have cost literally millions of lives.”
The full scope of coordination between Pfizer’s leadership and the White House remains locked in documents Berenson has not yet been able to access. But the government has now admitted, in writing, that it violated a journalist’s First Amendment rights.
