The benevolently named Public Good Projects (PGP) describes itself as a public health nonprofit with focus on “large-scale media monitoring programs, social and behavior change interventions.”
A new report is now shedding more light of how the system of censorship and deplatforming of Covid vaccine skeptics worked at the height of the pandemic, including the intricate ties between a number of actors, such as the PGP, and their partners.
One of them is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) non-profit called the CDC Foundation (the CDC itself was established by Congress). Other partners include FDA, Kaiser Permanente, Rockefeller, and Humana, as per the Tennessee Department of Health, which cites these as part of the bio of the PGP CEO, Dr. Joe Smyser.
And the Public Goods Project in the past received funding not from lobbyists for just any corporate players but those strongly interested in stomping out any vaccine hesitancy – namely, vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer and Moderna.
To add another “ingredient” into this “dish” that will appear unsavory to many, the New York City’s Health Department Misinformation Response Unit was also among those the PGP has in its portfolio of collaborations.
But things get more granular from there. The PGP operates an initiative called Shots Heard, while another one with a similar mission is called Team Halo and is the brainchild of the United Nations Verified initiative and the Vaccine Confidence Project.
An Epoch Times report details how in 2021, Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a doctor who graduated from Stanford, was one of those caught in their crosshairs online.
Bowden’s “crime” was posting content on Twitter and TikTok skeptical of the vaccine, and at the same time positive of the use of ivermectin in Covid treatment.
This drew the attention and the ire of influencers on these platforms and YouTube, themselves doctors – such as Zachary Rubin and Christina Kim, members of Team Halo.
Bowden was called “problematic” in their posts, and they asked for her license to be revoked.
Only days after, in November 2021, Bowden learned from a Houston Chronicle journalist, rather than from the hospital itself, that she was getting suspended from Houston Methodist.
“Over the following months, Bowden’s life was thrown into chaos as multiple social media influencers targeted her. However, the most dogged was a pharmacist named Savannah, who posts under the handle @rxOrcist,” the article continued.
And “Savannah” – who is a member of Shots Heard – and posts to over a million followers, even managed to accuse Bowden of “xenophobia and racism” because she was talking about anti-ivermectin pharmacists, many of whom happened to be Asian.
The result was TikTok banning Bowden, YouTube suspending her, while suspected fake patients left negative reviews which the doctor is unable to get deleted. And there were even incidents in her office where security had to get involved.
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