Controversies originating from those who gained the most from the pandemic – most visibly, Big Pharma – refuses to go away.
One of the leading (and among the earliest) producers of Covid vaccines was US-based Moderna. We know for sure that the vaccine worked for Moderna – turning it from the verge of collapse into a $100 billion company, Defender reports.
Related: Moderna Is Caught Monitoring Online Speech
But in large part due to the unusual speed with which vaccines were put through trials and then to market, many people – from regular citizens to public figures to medical professionals and scientists – felt skepticism about their efficacy and safety.
Expressing that openly, though, tended to get those people canceled or at least monitored and/or censored, and now new documents reveal Moderna’s role. Among them were journalists Alex Berenson, Stanford Health Policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, and actor Russell Brand.
In one instance, they “flagged a Russell Brand video in which he raised concerns about former British health official Jonathan Van-Tam, who was instrumental in COVID-19 policymaking and then took a high-level job at Moderna,” writes Defender.
Despite the billions in revenues raked in by Big Pharma, this obviously wasn’t enough, especially once the Covid panic started to subside and vaccine sales stalled.
And so Moderna sought out online media surveillance partners, and found one in the Public Goods Projects non-profit (otherwise receiving funds from Big Pharma), which was then useful in getting Covid vaccine skeptics silenced or censored on Twitter – Moderna and its partner, of course, called this combating “medical information.”
Related: Campaign funded by Pfizer and Moderna lobbyists sent Twitter weekly lists of tweets to censor
The documents, uncovered by RealClearInvestigations and journalist Lee Fang, show that independent media and their commentators, especially well-known and influential ones, were of specific interest in a bid to protect Moderna – but health agencies.
The goal was to suppress doubt or criticism about any side effects linked to the vaccine, and Twitter was not the only place Moderna was “monitoring:” unsurprisingly, given its critical bent, a site like Zerohedge, but also the New York Times, should a “negative” observation fly under the radar, which is/was indeed a very rare event for that “paper of record.”
Plus, no less than about 150 million websites in between, according to the documents, “the Moderna Files.” They paint a picture of mass surveillance carried out by a private company.
“The documents seem to show that Moderna is running a corporate public relations effort designed to boost sagging vaccine sales under the veneer of public health,” Fang is quoted as saying.
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