A newly released email from the Twitter Files has revealed that Twitter censored a tweet from Dr. Brett Giroir, a board member at the biopharmaceutical company Altesa Biosciences, after it was flagged by Scott Gottlieb, a board member at the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.
Gottlieb and Giroir both currently serve on the boards of several pharmaceutical companies and have backgrounds in public health. Gottlieb is a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner while Giroir is a former Assistant Secretary for Health and former acting Commissioner of the FDA.
Pfizer produces Covid vaccines whereas Altesa Biosciences develops drugs to combat Covid.
In the August 27, 2021 email, which was published by journalist Alex Berenson, Gottlieb complained to Todd O’Boyle, a senior manager on Twitter’s Public Policy team, about a tweet from Giroir that claimed natural immunity to Covid-19 was superior to vaccine immunity.
“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. “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 forwarded Gottlieb’s email to Twitter’s Strategic Response team — a team that was tasked with handling complaints from Twitter’s most important employees and users.
Berenson said that O’Boyle didn’t mention that Gottlieb was a Pfizer board member in this email and instead wrote, “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.”
An analyst from Twitter’s Strategic Response team quickly found that the tweet didn’t violate any of Twitter’s “misinformation” rules, according to Berenson. However, the tweet was still slapped with a “Misleading” label and had its replies, shares, and likes disabled after Gottlieb’s complaint.
This label and the restrictions still haven’t been removed, even though several high-ranking health officials, such as former White House Covid response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, have since questioned the effectiveness of Covid vaccines when it comes to preventing infections.
Berenson also claimed that one week later, on September 3, 2021, Gottlieb complained about a tweet from Covid lockdown and vaccine skeptic Justin Hart.
The Hart tweet that Gottlieb reportedly complained about stated: “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.”
Berenson alleged that Gottlieb complained about this tweet when the Pfizer Covid vaccine “would soon be approved for children 5 to 11.”
However, Berenson said that this time, Twitter refused to act.
Previous Twitter email releases have revealed that during the same month that Gottlieb was complaining about Giroir’s tweet, he also flagged one of Berenson’s articles to Twitter. Berenson was temporarily suspended from Twitter days after Gottlieb flagged his article.
Gottlieb responded to the revelations about him flagging Giroir’s tweet by claiming that the publication of this email was a “selective disclosure” of his “private communications with Twitter” and that it had stoked “the threat environment” and instigated “more menacing dialogue, with potentially serious consequences.”
Giroir accused Gottlieb of scheming with Twitter to “apparently put corporate interests first not public health.”
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