Trying to refute collusive practices involving major social media companies is probably not high on the agenda of the US government right this moment; nevertheless, the evidence of the highly controversial practice keeps rolling in.
America First Legal (AFL), a conservative non-profit, has disclosed a new batch of documents obtained through litigation, this time against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It concerns May 2021 communications meant to set the tone online and “manage” the government agenda around topics related to Covid vaccines.
The emails were exchanged between Facebook and CDC – and the documents focus on the activities of CDC spokesperson Carol Crawford, who also “happened” to be involved with Twitter’s Partner Support Portal around the same time.
This Twitter program’s “secret superpower” was that it allowed government-affiliated individuals to participate in flagging content for censorship.
Genelle Adrien (of the Politics and Government Outreach Team over at Facebook) and Crawford “star” in the email chain obtained by AFL, with the latter being asked point blank that the CDC approve Facebook’s “COVID-19 Information Center FAQ.”
Of concern to Adrien was particularly what the platform’s users should be allowed to say about the vaccine’s side effects. And CDC provided that guidance – some words were replaced, and other sentences were removed.
Thus “joint pain” was gone, but “nausea” was added as a possible side effect. And then these whole two sentences disappeared from what Facebook had prepared as its Covid vaccine safety FAQ:
“More serious side effects are extremely rare. A person is far more likely to be seriously harmed by a disease than by its vaccine.”
There are various ways to interpret this decision, but one is that CDC (by proxy, as Facebook’s guidance adviser) may have wished to avoid the risk of getting sued (alas, it did get sued – but for colluding with Facebook).
Even though the original language was fairly “soft” – if anything, the social platform looked keen to minimize any serious side effects, and promote the vaccines – it was too much for CDC to stand behind.
In one of the emails, Crawford writes that the CDC had no “cleared language, as far as I know, to support the second and third sentences.”
However, the Biden administration continued to urge people to get the jab throughout that year, with Biden himself spreading seemingly unfounded fear that the unvaccinated people would “soon overwhelm hospitals” with “a winter (2021/22) of severe illness and death” up ahead.
But, as AFL notes: “The CDC appears to have admitted that in May of 2021, months after the vaccine had already been rolled out, they could not confirm that the vaccine was safer than contracting COVID-19 itself and developing natural immunity. Nonetheless, the CDC continued to push the American people to take the vaccine.”
