Login
The Biden administration’s surgeon general created a “misinformation tiger team” to place “maximum pressure” on social media platforms to censor COVID-19 “misinformation.”
But newly surfaced documents show that the team also had bigger plans: establish a permanent censorship apparatus targeting health and medical “misinformation.”
The documents, published last month by the Daily Caller News Foundation, show that former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s team developed COVID-19 talking points for Murthy, which advised him to “avoid” discussing concerns about vaccine safety or the regulatory process for rolling out the vaccines to the public.
The talking points also included suggesting that the unvaccinated “present problems” for themselves, family members and colleagues, and advising Murthy to present the COVID-19 shots as the only public health intervention that would “stop the spread.”
Murthy’s team also instructed him to respond to questions about the censorship of online content questioning COVID-19 vaccines, mandates and lockdowns as the “opposite” of “cancel culture.” The team told Murthy to tell the public that removing “misinformation” would give people unfettered access to “science and evidence-based health information.”
Federal government’s censorship ‘machinery was built to last’
The documents were obtained in 2021 through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Protect the Public’s Trust, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
The Daily Caller described the revelations as an example of the Biden administration’s “Censorship-Industrial Complex” — one with “grander ambitions than controlling just what Americans said about COVID-19.”
“These documents show an administration consumed by its campaign against what it termed ‘misinformation,’ potentially at the expense of other priorities, and intent on controlling what Americans could say,” said Alexa Moutevelis, communications director for Protect the Public’s Trust, in a statement to the Daily Caller.
Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., CEO of DailyClout and author of “The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity,” said it is “chilling to see how systematically and with what bureaucratic smugness the official leaders of ‘the science’ and of ‘public health’ were willing to lie to the public” and suspend Americans’ First Amendment rights.
Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo, said the documents show that “COVID-19 was the test run” and that the federal government’s censorship “machinery was built to last” beyond the Biden administration’s term in office.
Murthy’s ‘tiger team’ sought to remove ‘true information’
According to the Daily Caller, the documents show that the Biden administration had a “broad” vision for expanding its COVID-19-era censorship tools to all matters of public health — while specifically focusing on the young.
In a May 2021 email sent one day before Murthy met with “WH [White House] folks” to discuss misinformation, Daniel Tartakovsky, Murthy’s policy adviser, wrote that it “May be worth emphasizing that you don’t just see this as a COVID-related issue (i.e., it’s health and medical misinformation, not just COVID-related misinformation).”
“More broadly, it gets at the issue of how social media impacts people, especially young people,” Tartakovsky wrote in his email. Tartakovsky tagged Adam Beckman, then-special adviser to Murthy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in the email to Murthy.
The documents indicate that Murthy’s censorship efforts soon ramped up. By July 15, 2021, his office was preparing to issue a formal advisory on misinformation.
Two days later, then-President Joe Biden told reporters that social media companies like Facebook are “killing people” by allowing purported misinformation about COVID-19 to circulate on their platforms.
An internal Facebook email dated July 21, 2021, and revealed in 2024 as part of a congressional investigation, stated that Murthy “wants us to remove true information about side effects” linked to the COVID-19 shots.
That summer, Murthy’s “tiger team” released another, more extensive memorandum laying out a strategy for combating so-called misinformation, and plans to apply “maximum pressure/engagement” on social media platforms.
The plan included bringing researchers and tech together for a “closed door session,” convening “experts to hold FB [Facebook] and other tech providers accountable,” and suggestions for Murthy to “use his bully pulpit to address health misinformation as one of his top three talking points (Masks, Mental Health, Misinformation).”
Murthy would accomplish this through “at least one monthly tier 1 media hit on Health Misinfo” — naming outlets and programs such as The New York Times, ABC, CNN, NPR and Fox News Sunday.
The plan also called for outreach to health professionals including New York City’s health commissioner, educators — including college presidents — and the business community. The plan also floated partnerships with celebrities — including Prince Harry, Will Ferrell, Selena Gomez and RuPaul — to produce a “comedy video series.”
The memorandum also highlighted a closer Biden administration partnership with Stanford University as a key component of Murthy’s public messaging plans.
Documents released in 2022 and 2023 as part of the “Twitter Files” revealed that the Cyber Policy Center and its Stanford Internet Observatory collaborated with several federal agencies and officials — and with Big Tech platforms — to censor online posts questioning the official COVID-19 narrative.
Daniel O’Connor, founder and president of TrialSite News, told The Defender that the Biden administration’s efforts “represent a deeply troubling chapter in American public health, not to mention government overreach.”
“Scientific progress depends on open inquiry, transparency and the freedom to challenge prevailing assumptions — not government officials deciding which questions Americans are permitted to ask,” O’Connor said. He said plans to build a permanent censorship apparatus pose “a real danger” to the American people.
Attorney Greg Glaser said the Biden administration’s censorship push violated the First Amendment.
“It is black-letter law that the government cannot do indirectly through private intermediaries what it is forbidden from doing directly. … ‘Maximum pressure’ is not the language of neutral public-health guidance; it is the language of state coercion,” Glaser said.
This article was funded by critical thinkers like you.
The Defender is 100% reader-supported. No corporate sponsors. No paywalls. Our writers and editors rely on you to fund stories like this that mainstream media won’t write.
Murthy advised to ‘avoid’ discussing vaccine safety concerns
By August 2021, Murthy’s team had prepared a list of talking points for the business community.
The talking points, cited in the Daily Caller’s report, advised Murthy to tell business leaders who were “having a hard time finding qualified staff” and who were “worried that wading into this polarized debate over vaccines will make it even harder to hold on to workers” to defend the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates.
The talking points included claims that “if people are vaccinated, the transmission rate drops” and that “vaccine requirements will stop the spread of variants and keep more people safe.”
However, “If you are unvaccinated, you present a problem to yourself, family, and those with whom you work,” the talking points stated.
Notes for an Aug. 26, 2021, “fireside chat” involving Murthy advised him to urge parents to “have your kids wear masks” and to advise state governments that were unwilling to require masks in schools to “get out of the way and let local districts do what’s best for students.”
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), noted that the Biden administration subsequently “dialed up” public pressure, leading to Biden’s Sept. 9, 2021, statement that “our patience” with the unvaccinated “is wearing thin.”
As these efforts ramped up, so did the censorship, the documents show.
Murthy’s “tiger team” cited the temporary deplatforming of then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from Twitter — now known as X — and YouTube’s “policy change” as examples, while a 2021 “stakeholder Q&A” advising Murthy on how to respond to “tough” questions suggested that then-President Donald Trump and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) were “spreading misinformation.”
Murthy was also coached on how to respond to a hypothetical question about censorship being “a part of cancel culture.”
“No, it’s the opposite actually, this is ensuring that people have more access to science and evidence based health information that has been vetted and tested by public health professionals who’s only goal is to keep Americans healthy so that they can live better and fuller lives,” the Q&A states.
Ji, a member of “The Disinformation Dozen” list published in 2021, which also included current U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and which was used by the Biden administration to censor those figures on social media, said: “those of us on the Disinformation Dozen list felt such censorship in real time.”
What’s new from these documents “is how candid they were about it. In their own internal documents, officials called their campaign ‘pressure.’ They treated a sitting congresswoman’s suspension as ‘momentum,’” Ji said.
“Enforcement reached far beyond us, to millions of ordinary people whose posts were removed, throttled, labeled or demonetized with no notice, no hearing and no appeal. Doctors, parents, injured people and small publishers were silenced at exactly the moment the public most needed open scientific discussion.”
Related articles in The Defender
- The ‘Disinformation Dozen’: Targeted by Government, Maligned by Media. Where Are They Today?
- ‘Unacceptable and Wrong’: Google Admits to Censoring COVID Content Under Pressure From Biden Administration
- Zuckerberg: White House Would ‘Scream’ and ‘Curse’ at Facebook Staff to Remove COVID Content
- New ‘Facebook Files’ Add to Evidence Biden Pressured Facebook to Censor ‘Disinformation Dozen’
- ‘The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine’: Stanford University Project Colluded With Feds, Social Media to Censor ‘Misinformation’
- Twitter Files: U.S. Taxpayers ‘Unwittingly Financing the Growth and Power of a Censorship-Industrial Complex’
- White House Colluded With Twitter to Censor RFK Jr., Emails Reveal
