New internal emails released via the Twitter Files reveal that Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a member of the board of directors of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and former FDA commissioner, colluded with a top White House lobbyist to pressure Twitter to suppress a tweet from Dr. Brett Giroir, acting commissioner of the FDA under Donald Trump.
The emails were released through journalist and coronavirus policy skeptic Alex Berenson, who posted the findings on his newsletter, Unreported Truths.
1/ My first #TwitterFiles report: how @scottgottliebmd – a top Pfizer board member – used the same Twitter lobbyist as the White House to suppress debate on Covid vaccines, INCLUDING FROM A FELLOW HEAD OF @US_FDA!
Thanks @elonmusk for opening these files.https://t.co/UbHlmtjELP
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) January 9, 2023
The tweet from Dr. Giroir, who briefly headed the FDA after Gottlieb left, called on the White House to exempt people with natural immunity from taking the coronavirus jab.
“It’s now clear COVID-19 natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity, by A LOT,” tweeted Giroir. “There’s no science justification for vax proof if a person had prior infection. [The CDC Director and the President] must follow the science. If no previous infection? Get vaccinated!”
Upon seeing the tweet, posted August 27, 2021, Gottlieb immediately emailed Twitter’s point of contact with the White House, Todd O’Boyle.
Via Unreported Truths:
Gottlieb stepped in, emailing Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who was also Twitter’s point of contact with the White House.
The post was “corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. He worried it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage.”
As noted by Berenson, at the time of emailing, Gottlieb was already a board member at Pfizer:
By suggesting some people might not need Covid vaccinations, the tweet could raise questions about the shots. Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on Covid public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.
But O’Boyle made no mention of Gottlieb’s Pfizer ties when he forwarded the request to Twitter’s strategic response team:
“Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner,” O’Boyle wrote – failing to mention that Gottlieb was a Pfizer board member with a financial interest in pushing mRNA shots.
A Strategic Response analyst quickly found the tweet did not violate any of the company’s misinformation rules.
Despite the Strategic Response analyst finding the tweet violated no rules, Twitter suppressed it anyway, putting a “misleading” tag on it and suppressing its reach on the platform.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
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