Elon Musk Turns Over Twitter Records To Key Source Of COVID Misinformation

Twitter owner Elon Musk turns over access to internal company documents to sources of misinformation about vaccines that have been providing public health advice for years, most recently in shift far right on one of the most influential social media sites in the world.

Alex Berenson, a former reporter for the New York Times – called the Atlantic “The Most Wrong Person of the Pandemic“in 2021 – Published article Substack there as part of the so-called “Twitter Files,” or Musk’s effort to turn certain internal Twitter records in favor of writers and journalists.

Berenson is often and clearly wrong about the pandemic. For example, he was asked in October 2020, why would anyone believe the forecast of 500,000 COVID deaths next spring – only for the number of deaths to exceed that figure by Februarythen double in May 2022.

But worse than just being wrong, they have, on many occasions, given readers the wrong information about vaccines. In one example, Berenson in November 2021 quoted British mortality data for people aged 10-59 and wrote, “Vaccinated Britons under the age of 60 die at twice the rate of unvaccinated people of the same age … In eight days, according to Berenson, the link to the post has been shared twice 800,000, and screenshots have been shared by millions across the web. But they were wrong, and dramatically so.

Fact-checkers and British officials noticed a basic misunderstanding: Berenson had written “age” but indicated age. coverage, lumping together all ages 10-59. Older Britons in the range have been prioritized for the vaccine, so more are being vaccinated than younger people. And older people, vaccinated and not, are generally more likely to die than younger people. As a spokesperson for the UK’s Office for National Statistics told PolitiFact, “The vaccinated are older and the unvaccinated are younger, thus increasing the all-cause mortality rate for the vaccinated.”

“This is all a bit complicated, I’ll admit,” Berenson said in a follow-up post, but emphasized that the misrepresented chart “uses real data to raise an important issue.”

Berenson is there prohibited from Twitter in 2021 for “repeated violations of the COVID-19 misinformation rules,” but he sued the company and was reinstated as part of the settlement. He later vowed to sue the Biden administration after an internal Twitter chatter described Biden administration officials as treating him as a “disinfo center,” as Andy Slavitt, who later served as Biden’s COVID-19 adviser, is said to have described Berenson. (Slavitt already did not return he asked Twitter to censor Berenson.)

You get the picture: As The Atlantic notes, Berenson’s selective and erroneous interpretation of pandemic data has cast doubt on vaccine efficacy statistics, the immune response to vaccines, Israel’s vaccine strategy, and even the ideal age for vaccination. (Berenson recommends a cut-off for healthy people at 70. According to the CDC data analyzing 99% of the reported COVID deaths, at least 166,858 Americans aged 50-64 have died from COVID, as well as 38,151 Americans in their 40s, and hundreds of thousands have been hospitalized for the disease and face long. – term effect.)

Recently, Berenson has taken to Twitter to claim without evidence that the football reporter is dead Grant Wahl and collapsed on the field of NFL players Damar Hamlin they are tied to the COVID-19 vaccine.

Berenson’s “Twitter Files” report is pretty straightforward. In it, he reprinted an email to the Twitter team from Scott Gottlieb, who served as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in the Trump administration and then joined the board of Pfizer in 2019. Gottlieb has long been a target of Berenson, and Berenson has announced his intention to sue Gottlieb. and others who allegedly conspired to have him removed from Twitter.

The records show Gottlieb sent an email to Twitter about a post from Brett Giroir, who served as assistant secretary of health in the Trump administration and, briefly, acted as FDA commissioner. Giroir wrote in August 2021 that natural immunity from previous COVID infections is “superior” to vaccine-derived immunity “by ALOT.” People who are already infected should not get the jab, Giroir wrote.

After Gottlieb’s email — which called Giroir’s tweet “corrosive” and said it drew “sweeping conclusions” based on a single study — the company tagged Giroir’s tweet as “misleading,” Berenson reported.

Berenson was pleased with the access, repeatedly claiming Gottlieb was acting on behalf of Pfizer’s financial interests and concluding his story, “So how did Pfizer react to the black-and-white evidence from Twitter records that one of its most powerful board members was secretly trying to prevent debate about mRNA jabs which has been the best selling product since 2020?

But as virologist Angela Rasmussen points out Twitter“The only problem is that Dr. Giroir’s tweet *is* incorrect by A LOT. ‘Natural immunity’ is different & not superior to vaccine-induced immunity. Even in 2021, we know that acquired immunity to most infections corresponds to vaccine-induced immunity. Giroir, for his part, write, “My tweets were accurate, and still are.” Gottlieb the answer by posting some emails sent to Twitter that Berenson decided not to reprint – tweets he marked as a threat to safety.

In response to Berenson’s blog post, Musk tweeted, then apparently removeda post which reads, “Some true conspiracies.”

Musk, who has been in touch with Berenson on Twitter since the early months of the pandemic, has a terrible track record of his own on COVID comments: He had predicted in March 2020 that there would be “close to zero new cases in the US” by the end of the following. month. That’s actually what happened to more than a million Americans who died.

That didn’t stop Musk from embracing COVID skeptics and conspiracy theorists on Twitter: In November, Twitter quietly updated a web page to state that it “does not implement a policy of confusing information on COVID-19” as of November 23.

At that time, coinciding with the release of the anti-vaccine film “Died Suddenly,” the number of tweets with keywords related to conspiracy theories – such as “Covid AND hoax” or “Fauci AND lies” – increased dramatically, Australians. researchers found.

Last month, two prominent doctors who had been suspended for violating the COVID-19 misinformation policy had their accounts reinstated.

The introduction of Musk’s paid “verification” badge – even though no verification has actually taken place – has also resulted in a distinct blue badge being affixed to several anti-vaccine accounts with tens of thousands of followers, The Guardian reported.

In a blog post on Monday, Berenson noted that he plans to “report more on the file in the coming weeks.”