Tuesday, January 10, 2023



The White House covid censorship machine

Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily. The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

On March 14, 2021, Mr. Flaherty emailed a Facebook executive (whose name we’ve redacted as a courtesy) with the subject line “You are hiding the ball” and a link to a Washington Post article about Facebook’s own research into “the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy,” as the paper put it. “I think there is a misunderstanding,” the executive wrote back. “I don’t think this is a misunderstanding,” Mr. Flaherty replied. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy—period. . . . We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game. . . . This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”

On March 21, after failing to placate Mr. Flaherty, the Facebook executive sent an email detailing the company’s planned policy changes. They included “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.” Facebook characterised this material as “often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.” Facebook pledged to “remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalised content.”

In that exchange, Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what Facebook was doing to “limit the spread of viral content” on WhatsApp, a private message app, especially “given its reach in immigrant communities and communities of colour.” The company responded three weeks later with a lengthy list of promises.

On April 9, Mr. Flaherty asked “what actions and changes you’re making to ensure . . . you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” He faulted the company for insufficient zeal in earlier efforts to control political speech: “In the electoral context, you tested and deployed an algorithmic shift that promoted quality news and information about the election. . . . You only did this, however, after an election that you helped increase scepticism in, and an insurrection which was plotted, in large part, by your platform. And then you turned it back off. I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” The executive’s response: “Understood.”

On April 14, Mr. Flaherty pressed the executive about why “the top post about vaccines today” is Tucker Carlson “saying they don’t work”: “I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like,” he said. The exec responded: “Running this down now.”

On April 23, Mr. Flaherty sent the executive an internal memo that he claimed had been circulating in the White House. It asserts that “Facebook plays a major role in the spread of COVID vaccine misinformation” and accuses the company of, among other things, “failure to monitor events hosting anti-vaccine and COVID disinformation” and “directing attention to COVID-sceptics/anti-vaccine ‘trusted’ messengers.”

On May 10, the executive sent Mr. Flaherty a list of steps Facebook had taken “to increase vaccine acceptance.” Mr. Flaherty scoffed, “Hard to take any of this seriously when you’re actively promoting anti-vaccine pages in search,” and linked to an NBC reporter’s tweet. The executive wrote back: “Thanks Rob—both of the accounts featured in this tweet have been removed from Instagram entirely for breaking our policies.”

President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden his “message to platforms like Facebook.” He replied, “They’re killing people.” Mr. Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign.

Mr. Flaherty also strongarmed Google in April 2021, accusing YouTube (which it owns) of “funnelling” people into vaccine hesitancy. He said this concern was “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH,” and required “more work to be done.” Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what further measures Google would take to remove disfavoured content. An executive responded that the company was working to “address your concerns related to Covid-19 misinformation.”

These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government-approved Covid narratives. Two of the Missouri plaintiffs, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line—for instance, that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need Covid vaccines.

Emails made public through earlier lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act requests and Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files had already exposed a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. The government directed tech companies to remove certain types of material and even to censor specific posts and accounts. Again, these included truthful messages casting doubt on the efficacy of masks and challenging Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

The First Amendment bars government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. The state-action doctrine bars government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly.

Defenders of the government have fallen back on the claim that co-operation by the tech companies was voluntary, from which they conclude that the First Amendment isn’t implicated. The reasoning is dubious, but even if it were valid, the premise has now been proved false.

The Flaherty emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced the companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19. As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americans were given the false impression of a scientific “consensus” on critically important issues around Covid-19. A reckoning for the government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is under way in court.

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Serious post-Covid syndrome hits a LOT of people

Rounding on three years into the coronavirus pandemic, scientists project there are over 100 million COVID long haulers worldwide. A recent Brookings Institution study estimated that around 16 million working-age Americans currently have Long COVID, costing $168 billion a year in lost earnings, not to mention the missed personal and professional opportunities and the high toll it takes on families. And countless more will suffer from it before the pandemic is in our collective rearview mirror.

It isn’t just life or death. Even a mild case of the virus can disable many of us for the rest of our lives. And our leaders had no idea.

On March 11, 2020, I was shadowing a producer on the Anderson Cooper 360° show. During the eight-hour shift, the producer frequently used sanitizing wipes to clean every inch of the workstation in our small edit bay. The day was spent preparing for President Donald Trump’s address from the Oval Office. Much of the speech was an attempt to project a Reaganesque optimism, broadcasting the idea the virus was no match for the greatest nation on earth.

Later that night as I walked out of the CNN Center, a building to which I’d reported nearly every day for five years, I didn’t realize that as the whole company shifted to working from home, it would be 17 months before I set foot in the office again.

A week later, I began what would become a year-long assignment as a features writer for CNN primarily focused on science, health and wellness. As with nearly everyone on earth, just about every conversation I would have over the next year revolved around the virus.

On the night of his Oval Office address, Trump focused his comments toward “the vast majority of Americans,” explaining that “the risk is very, very low. Young and healthy people can expect to recover fully and quickly if they should get the virus.” I knew those words to be inadequate then. And over the ensuing months, I would continually publish stories reporting on a growing group of survivors who would come to be called COVID-19 “long haulers.”

It would turn out to be true that the majority of patients infected with the virus would get better quickly, but that number would fall short of being the VAST majority. Public health leaders’ early comments about most people getting better, which reflected the prevailing public belief at the time, didn’t begin to capture the full picture of the disaster that would happen in the lives of many of the pandemic’s survivors.

In the weeks after lockdowns began, I received a disquieting message from Linda Tannenbaum, executive director of the Open Medicine Foundation, a nonprofit organization in California dedicated to funding research for complex chronic diseases. She’d been a friend and a source for my stories for nearly a decade. The scientists her organization worked with were prestigious forward thinkers, and she was alarmed at what they could already see. She confided that she expected the novel coronavirus, which had been designated SARS-CoV-2, could cause years or even decades of disability in some sufferers. So many other long-time sources reached out with the same warning that I began to dread picking up my phone.

COVID-19 had its predecessor in the first severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which mainly terrorized Asia in the early years of the new millennium. For many patients, Tannenbaum explained, that virus had left years of wreckage in its wake. A 2009 study of 369 SARS survivors published in JAMA Internal Medicine showed that four years after initial infection, some 40 percent had a chronic fatigue problem, and 27 percent met the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s diagnostic criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome. If the second SARS virus— which causes COVID-19—were to prove as wicked in the long term as the first, it might mean years of disability for a swath of humanity.

And looking at scientific literature about previous epidemics, I saw similar trends in history. Before researcher Jonas Salk pioneered a vaccine in the 1950s that led to the disease being virtually eradicated, the polio virus fueled terrifying outbreaks around the world for millennia, accounting for many deaths among children and causing irreversible paralysis in about one in 200 patients. But, less commonly acknowledged, the virus also caused post-polio syndrome in 25 to 40 percent of survivors, leading to muscle aches and fatigue that could last for decades. Likewise, the Ebola virus, which caused more than 28,000 cases during its 2014–2016 epidemic, left its own post-viral syndrome. During that outbreak, Ebola killed more than a third of those it infected, and more than 70 percent of survivors were left with a constellation of symptoms including headaches, joint pain, fatigue and menstrual cessation.

In 2020, as health care systems around the world were overwhelmed with dying patients, thousands of very sick people dealing with the ongoing effects of COVID-19 began gathering in online support groups offering each other guidance as months passed and their expected recovery never came.

In July, the CDC released a study of 292 COVID-19 patients showing that 35 percent of them still had symptoms after two or three weeks; among younger people between ages 18 and 34, about one in five included in the study had not fully recovered. Assuming that data generalized to the wider population, it was evidence showing that COVID-19 could linger beyond its two-week recovery time and longterm symptoms were a possibility.

The next month, a science writer colleague sent me a study from the United Kingdom that burned itself into my consciousness. It appeared to show that about three-quarters of those hospitalized for COVID-19 experienced symptoms beyond the 12-week mark. Another long hauler symptom study out of the U.K., which has now tracked five million patients via a symptom-tracking app, showed that one in 10 people were sick for at least three weeks.

The fears that my sources and friends had expressed to me were being realized.

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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