Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
Moderna ran an internet surveillance operation that specifically targeted independent media commentators who questioned mainstream narratives about COVID-19 vaccines, according to internal documents obtained by RealClearInvestigations and journalist Lee Fang.
The “Moderna Reports,” published Tuesday on Fang’s Substack, showed how Moderna monitored high-profile dissenters, including journalists Alex Berenson and Michael Shellenberger, political commentator Russell Brand and Stanford Health Policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D.
The documents also showed how Moderna collaborated with pharma-funded nonprofit The Public Goods Projects to have dissenters de-amplified or censored on Twitter.
Moderna’s operation also flagged stories from websites like Zerohedge, Twitter users commenting on documented COVID-19 mRNA vaccine side effects, and even news stories from mainstream outlets, such as The New York Times that regularly promoted industry-friendly vaccine narratives when articles by those outlets contained facts that could be used to cast Moderna or the public health agencies in a negative light.
“The documents seem to show that Moderna is running a corporate public relations effort designed to boost sagging vaccine sales under the veneer of public health,” Fang told The Defender in an email.
Monday’s report was the second in a series by Fang and RealClearInvestigations on the Moderna reports.
Part 1 exposed how key actors who came to Moderna from law enforcement produced reports on disinformation, and how Moderna hired a “social listening” company to monitor 150 million websites for the purpose of censoring speech that undermined the company’s COVID-19 vaccine narrative. Moderna also used the social listening company to shape public discourse to benefit Moderna’s bottom line.
Part 1 also revealed that the vaccine maker distributed talking points and advice on how to respond to vaccine “misinformation” to a network of 45,000 healthcare professionals.
Moderna, Public Goods Project aimed to ‘shut down’ ‘vaccine misinformation’
Moderna had never successfully advanced any product to market prior to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine and was teetering on the edge of collapse when the pandemic was announced.
Its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine transformed the drugmaker into a $100 billion company almost overnight and turned its CEO, chairman and co-founders into billionaires.
However as public appetite for booster shots waned last fall, Moderna’s then-chief commercial officer, Arpa Garay, on an investor call blamed “uninformed vaccine skeptics” for some of the company’s woes, Fang reported.
Garay told investors the company was finding ways “across the ecosystem” to ensure that “consumers are educated on the need for the vaccine.”
He didn’t provide details, but the Moderna Reports show that the company, together with the Public Goods Project, was already implementing a series of strategies to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” and “shut down” the “misinformation.”
Those strategies included an “Infodemic Training Program” for thousands of healthcare workers, artificial intelligence monitoring online conversations and targeted monitoring of key voices.
Public Goods — largely funded by a $1,275 million donation from the Biotechnology and Innovation Organization, “a lobby group representing Pfizer and Moderna” — identified vaccine “misinformation” on Twitter and regularly sent the social media company Excel files listing accounts to amplify and to de-platform throughout 2020 and 2021, Fang found.
It also identified dangerous “emerging narratives,” Fang wrote, which were censored whether or not they were factually correct.
He wrote:
“Like the Twitter Files, the Moderna Reports highlight the push by powerful entities — especially government, Big Tech, and Big Pharma to identify and brand dissenting opinions about establishment narratives as risky forms of speech. The growing network these efforts rely on shows the growth of what has been called the censorship industrial complex.
“Moderna’s faltering financials also suggest, at least for now, the limits of that project.”
The Moderna documents included references to specific tweets by specific people, detailed in Fang’s reporting. For example, Moderna flagged an Alex Berenson tweet showing that based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a million teenagers would have to be vaccinated to prevent 0-1 death.
Again, from @CDCgov’s OWN data:
1 million mRNA Covid shots for teens will prevent
0-1 Covid deaths
and CAUSE
100,000-200,000 severe side effects.
Yes, you read that right. pic.twitter.com/GXpgIw3DvC
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) September 13, 2023
In another example, they flagged a Russell Brand video in which he raised concerns about former British health official Jonathan Van-Tam, who was instrumental in COVID-19 policymaking and then took a high-level job at Moderna.
Moderna also flaggedShellenberger and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) for reporting on and discussing a CIA whistleblower who alleged the agency suppressed an assessment that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As recently as October 2023, Moderna flagged a tweet by Bhattacharya sharing a U.S. Food and Drug Administration preprint study that documented elevated risk of seizures in children and myocarditis in teenagers associated with the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
That flagging happened even though Bhattacharya is a plaintiff in Missouri v. Biden, now before the U.S. Supreme Court, alleging the Biden administration coerced social media companies into censoring social media content about the COVID-19 vaccines, among other issues.
Kennedy et al. v. Biden et al., a lawsuit making similar First Amendment and censorship claims brought by Children’s Health Defense and its chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was consolidated with Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. in July.
The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy, who is on leave from CHD and is running as an independent for president of the U.S.
