Pfizer board member leaned on Twitter to censor tweet arguing for natural ... trends now
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Pfizer board member and former FDA head Scott Gottlieb used his influence to pressure Twitter to flag a tweet that cast doubt on Covid-19 vaccines, the latest batch of 'Twitter files' show.
Controversial reporter Alex Berenson alleged that Dr Scott Gottlieb used his influence to obscure a relatively innocuous post that could have hurt the vaccine maker Pfizer's Covid shot profits.
The claims are part of the Twitter files, a cache of internal documents and correspondences that have recently been made publicly available by a select number of journalists. Their aim is to highlight a range of censorship decisions Twitter made prior to the takeover by eccentric billionaire Elon Musk.
Dr Gottlieb called Dr Giroir's relatively innocuous tweet 'corrosive' in an internal email to company higher-ups, who apparently were not made aware of Gottlieb's financial ties to Pfizer
The Twitter post was 'corrosive,' Gottlieb wrote worried it would 'end up going viral and driving news coverage' in a negative way, possibly imperiling Pfizer's profits
Dr Gottlieb, who currently has a Twitter following about 550,0000-strong, lobbied for the Tweet to be flagged as misinformation. And even though the company could not prove outright that the tweet was a violation of its misinformation policy, it was slapped with a ‘Misleading’ label anyway.
Dr Gottlieb himself never requested that the tweet be labeled as such, just lamenting that the corrosive message would wind up ‘driving news coverage’ in a negative way.
Mr Berenson argued that Dr Gottlieb's motivation for quashing the tweet, which cast doubt on the necessity of the vaccines, was financial. In saying that natural immunity through prior exposure to the virus was superior to that conferred by the vaccine, Dr Brett Giroir was placing Pfizer’s sky high profits in jeopardy.
Dr Gottlieb’s financial ties to Pfizer were not flagged in internal emails regarding the tweet, and he was spoken about to
