Note: Dr. Orient is executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, AAPS.
Just after Elon Musk bought Twitter, promising more freedom, the Biden administration announces a new government agency to “protect” Americans and the world from harmful disinformation, especially about the COVID pandemic.
It is called the Disinformation Governance Board, although some would call it the Minitrue, short for Ministry of Truth, the ministry of propaganda in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” The abbreviation differs from KGB by only one letter.
There is the First Amendment, of course, but there is precedent for disregarding it, especially in war. Newspapers were shut down and editors arrested for expressing anti-war views, at the time of the Civil War by Abraham Lincoln and World War I by Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson even suppressed information about the raging 1918 influenza pandemic so as not to interfere with the war effort. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Wilson’s Espionage Act and its 20-year prison terms. Wilson even demanded that the Librarian of Congress report the names of those who ordered certain books! Today’s technology permits government to find out if you even looked at a book or article online.
Today, “mainstream media” are mostly owned by a few conglomerates, who all seem to be on board with the current Narrative about this “war” on COVID.
We can tell something about the Agenda from the accounts Twitter has banned: views of election fraud that favors Democrats; evidence of corrupt dealings with foreign governments by certain highly placed officials, say, from Hunter Biden’s laptop; and information contradicting the official narrative on COVID-19.
With COVID, disinformation is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Skepticism about masks and lockdowns, information about early treatment with cheap, repurposed drugs, or anything that might lead to “vaccine hesitancy” are anathema.
Who writes the message? According to Dr. Scott Atlas, who was briefly a member of President Trump’s COVID Task Force, in his book “A Plague upon Our House,” the nationwide message was dictated by Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield, even over the president’s objection. Was it “the Science”? Dr. Atlas immersed himself in the deluge of scientific articles and brought copies to meetings. They were ignored. Birx, he writes, relied on unreliable or outdated data to dictate “mitigation” measures. No one else was willing to confront her. The deadly results of useless lockdowns were not of interest.
Who is Deborah Birx to have the power to destroy Americans’ livelihood and lives? Most of her work had concerned the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Both Birx and Redfield had been accused of misrepresenting their results on an HIV vaccine.
Birx, like the others, is an appointed bureaucrat with no accountability to voters. But their agencies are honeycombed with conflicts of interest. So, accountable they are – to private interests.
The Narrative – there is no early treatment (except possibly monoclonal antibodies), just get vaccinated and you will be safe – might change, now that double-masked and quadruple-vaccinated Vice-President Kamala Harris has tested positive for COVID. She is getting Pfizer’s new oral drug Paxlovid™.
Pfizer has begun running animated 30-second spots focusing on how fast COVID-19 moves. It features a narrator saying you can move fast, too, by “asking your health care provider if a new oral treatment could be right for you.” The ad doesn’t mention the name of the drug, as it is not yet approved but only has an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). A Pfizer logo pops up at the end of the spot along with a link to Pfizer’s COVID-19 website.
Pfizer has so far spent $2.8 million on the commercial and expects to earn $22 billion from Paxlovid sales for 2022, paid for by taxpayers.
What would happen if Twitter allowed compare-and-contrast information for Paxlovid vs. ivermectin, which share a common mechanism of action? Number of studies: three for Paxlovid, 82 for ivermectin; number of patients studied, about 5,000 vs. more than 129,000; duration of experience with use, months vs. decades (ivermectin was approved in 1987); number of patients who have taken drug, thousands vs. billions.
But, such a comparison might be bad for Pfizer’s sales.
Americans believe they have freedom, but freedom to seek knowledge is increasingly constrained. Combining government enforcement powers with private corporations’ wealth and immunity from constitutional protections, and we have the “public-private partnership,” a formula for medical tyranny.
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