Republicans granted its panel a sweeping mandate that included investigations into pandemic-related school closures, gain-of-function research, vaccine mandates and the trillions of dollars in coronavirus aid Congress approved. The panel doesn’t yet have a Republican leader but expects to hold its first hearing next month.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) is set to chair the broader oversight panel under which the covid subcommittee’s work will fall. In an interview with Tony, Comer said investigators planned to “talk to the researchers,” including “all of the people that were involved” at the National Institutes of Health around the development of vaccines.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk handed over all the twitter documents to noted anti-vaxx activist, the novelist Alex Berenson for review:
Alex Berenson, a vocal COVID contrarian whose past commentary on the vaccine has received scorn by critics and praise by fans, was the latest to be granted access to Elon Musk’s Twitter Files, publishing his findings on his “Unreported Truths” Substack newsletter.
Berenson shared an August 2021 email Gottlieb sent to Twitter’s senior public policy manager Todd O’Boyle flagging a tweet written by former Trump administration official Dr. Brett Giroir, who had written “It’s now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity, by ALOT. There’s no scientific justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection.”
“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” Gottlieb told O’Boyle. “Here he draws a sweeping conclusion off a single retrospective study in Israel that hasn’t been peer reviewed. But this tweet will end up going viral and driving news coverage.”
According to Berenson, O’Boyle forward Gottlieb’s email to Twitter’s “Strategist Response” team, writing “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.”
Giroir’s tweet was later slapped with a “misleading” label and blocked any ability to like or share the tweet, telling Twitter users “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.”
Gottlieb, a CNBC contributor who was a prominent media pundit in the height of the pandemic, flagged another tweet in Sept. 2021, one from Substack writer and COVID policy critic Justin Hart, which read “Sticks and stones may break my bones but a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of ~0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling.”
“Why Gottlieb objected to Hart’s words is not clear, but the Pfizer shot would soon be approved for children 5 to 11, representing another massive market for Pfizer, if parents could be convinced Covid was a real threat to their kids,” Berenson wrote.
Berenson noted in his report that Gottlieb has also targeted him days before he was permanently suspended from Twitter (Berenson was later reinstated in July 2022 after a legal battle with the tech giant).
In the August 2021 tweet Gottlieb flagged, Berenson was critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“This is whats promoted on Twitter. This is why Tony needs a security detail,” Gottlieb told Twitter at the time.
In reaction to the latest Twitter Files, Gottlieb issued his own thread suggesting the disclosed emails don’t tell the whole story.
“In the past, I’ve raised concerns with Twitter related to the safety of me and others, and threats being made on the platform. This included direct as well as specific threats. Sometimes it included statements that I believed were purposely false and inflammatory,” Gottlieb wrote Monday. “The selective disclosure of my private communications with Twitter stokes the threat environment. So does actions that empower people who’ve shown little restraint when it comes to purposeful vitriol. It instigates more menacing dialogue, with potentially serious consequences.”
Gottlieb went on to share other emails he sent to Twitter flagging threatening tweets directed towards him and his family.
I’m sure those threats have now escalated as they will when the House extremists call him up to the Hill to testify before their anti-vaxx inquisition.
In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we’ve surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, theycan).
Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News’ most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S.
The vaccines have inspired his most troubling comments. For the past few weeks on Twitter, Berenson has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them. As his conspiratorial nonsense accelerates toward the pandemic’s finish line, he has proved himself the Secretariat of being wrong:
He has blamed the vaccines for causing spikes in severe illness, by pointing to data that actually demonstrate their safety and effectiveness.
He has suggested that countries such as Israel have suffered from their early vaccine rollout, even though deaths and hospitalizations among vaccinated groups in Israel have plummeted.
He has implied that for most non-seniors, the side effects of the vaccines are worse than having COVID-19 itself—even though, according to the CDC, the pandemic has killed tens of thousands of people under 50 and the vaccines have not conclusively killed anybody.
He is a fabulist and a liar and the idea that Musk and the Republicans are using the likes of him to kill even more people is simply shocking. Actually, I take that back. It’s completely in keeping with their behavior.
