The Biden administration’s surgeon general created a “misinformation tiger team” to place “maximum pressure” on social media platforms to censor COVID-19 “misinformation.”
But newly surfaced documents show that the team also had bigger plans: establish a permanent censorship apparatus targeting health and medical “misinformation.”
The documents, published last month by the Daily Caller News Foundation, show that former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s team developed COVID-19 talking points for Murthy, which advised him to “avoid” discussing concerns about vaccine safety or the regulatory process for rolling out the vaccines to the public.
The talking points also included suggesting that the unvaccinated “present problems” for themselves, family members and colleagues, and advising Murthy to present the COVID-19 shots as the only public health intervention that would “stop the spread.”
Murthy’s team also instructed him to respond to questions about the censorship of online content questioning COVID-19 vaccines, mandates and lockdowns as the “opposite” of “cancel culture.” The team told Murthy to tell the public that removing “misinformation” would give people unfettered access to “science and evidence-based health information.”
Federal government’s censorship ‘machinery was built to last’
The documents were obtained in 2021 through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Protect the Public’s Trust, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
The Daily Caller described the revelations as an example of the Biden administration’s “Censorship-Industrial Complex” — one with “grander ambitions than controlling just what Americans said about COVID-19.”
“These documents show an administration consumed by its campaign against what it termed ‘misinformation,’ potentially at the expense of other priorities, and intent on controlling what Americans could say,” said Alexa Moutevelis, communications director for Protect the Public’s Trust, in a statement to the Daily Caller.
Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., CEO of DailyClout and author of “The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity,” said it is “chilling to see how systematically and with what bureaucratic smugness the official leaders of ‘the science’ and of ‘public health’ were willing to lie to the public” and suspend Americans’ First Amendment rights.
Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo, said the documents show that “COVID-19 was the test run” and that the federal government’s censorship “machinery was built to last” beyond the Biden administration’s term in office.
