Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

This Censorious Pfizer Board Member Was A Major Influence On Lockdowns

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-censorious-scott-gottlieb-was-a-major-influence-on-lockdowns/
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1612526697038897167
https://brownstone.org/articles/jared-kushner-and-the-mystery-of-the-first-us-lockdown/

The latest of the Twitter Files is reported by Alex Berenson, who was
granted access to messaging systems from the times before Elon Musk
took over. His first round of reporting concerns the role of Scott
Gottlieb, who is a perfect example of an influencer who is technically
outside of government but might as well be a powerful official within
it.

Gottlieb’s main gig now is as a senior fellow of the American
Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, but he also serves as a board
member of Pfizer. Before joining AEI and Pfizer, he headed the Food
and Drug Administration under Trump from 2017 to 2019. Before that, he
was at Health and Human Services as a member of its Federal Health IT
Policy Committee from 2013 to 2017.

You probably know him from TV because he has been a ubiquitous
presence since the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns, defending the
government’s actions and pushing the vaccines from the company whose
board he serves.

In August 2021, he wrote Twitter to complain about a tweet from his
successor at the FDA, Brett Giroir. Giroir wrote to report the results
of a study in Israel that clearly demonstrated what most anyone could
have known even without the study: natural immunity is superior to
vaccinated immunity.

Gottlieb complained that the tweet is “corrosive” and might “go
viral.” Twitter acted by slapping a “misleading” tag on the tweet, one
that still remains to this day.

    It's now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine
immunity, by ALOT. There's no science justification for #vax proof if
a person had prior infection. @CDCDirector @POTUS must follow the
science. If no previous infection? Get vaccinated!
https://t.co/jFc0yHpF2f
    — Brett Giroir (@DrGiroir) August 28, 2021

Here is the email.

Now, one might observe that Gottlieb is merely a private person and
that it was certainly his right to object to anyone’s opinions. Maybe
that’s true, except that he served Pfizer at the time and his company
enjoyed billions in subsidies to make its product which not only
gained a patent but benefitted from product-liability protection that
is conventional with such vaccines. In addition, the product was only
distributed thanks to an Emergency Use Authorization that bypassed the
usual federal standards.

    "I've raised concerns about social media and the threats that are
being made on these platforms," says @ScottGottliebMD on Alex Berenson
being kicked off Twitter. "I'm unconcerned about debate being made.
I'm concerned about physical threats being made for people's safety."
pic.twitter.com/hxpALiT6dZ
    — Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) October 14, 2022

That aside, he had been massively influential on lockdown policies
from the very beginning, urging the Trump administration to be as
extreme as possible in its attack on civil liberties and freedoms.

We know this because Jared Kushner’s book reports every detail. He led
the effort to present the guidelines for lockdowns that occurred on
March 16, 2022, and he did it with the help of two tech executives he
tapped to hang around the White House. Kushner reports:

    As we dealt with the shortage of cotton swabs and other supplies,
we faced another problem: the need to develop public health
guidelines. Given that people across the country were confused and
concerned, Birx and Fauci had been discussing the need for a unified
set of federal standards to help Americans understand what they should
do to keep themselves safe and slow the spread of the virus. They
insisted that these guidelines would help prevent hospitals from
becoming overwhelmed. Despite all the talk over the past week, no one
had taken steps to produce a document. When Nat Turner flagged the
issue, I asked him to coordinate with Derek Lyons to produce a draft
and encouraged him to call Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the
FDA and a renowned public health expert. I had been trying to persuade
Gottlieb to come back into government for a short-term stint to help
us better organize our response and support our effort to develop a
vaccine.

    When we called Gottlieb, he was grateful that we were preparing
guidelines. “They should go a little bit further than you are
comfortable with,” he said. “When you feel like you are doing more
than you should, that is a sign that you are doing them right.”

So here we have a former government official now working as a board
member for one of the companies chosen to produce and distribute
vaccines who was directly involved and hugely influential in crafting
a policy for the Trump administration that ended up not only dooming
the Trump presidency but setting the entire country on the course to
recession and a public health crisis. Still Pfizer benefited,
obviously.

Sure enough, he got his way and the Trump administration issued the
draconian guidance: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other
indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be
closed.”

And why call out Gottlieb alone when many thousands of serious
scientists and medical professionals would have strongly advised
against locking down?

This is why what Berenson reports here is so significant. Gottlieb was
anxious not only to lock down the entire country but also to censor
any report on what used to be common-sense observations about natural
immunity, even when it comes from credentialed experts and cites
peer-reviewed studies.

After his lockdown advocacy, and before his intervention to pull down
a tweet celebrating natural immunity, but only after the vaccine came
to market, he took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to say that
the CDC had gone too far, especially with its enforcement of social
distancing: “The reliance on a flu model caused public-health
authorities to underestimate and overestimate Covid in important
ways.”

The person and role of Gottlieb is a paradigmatic case of why and how
unraveling the mysteries of the lockdowns and vaccine mandates is such
a complicated undertaking. It’s not just about government intervention
and it’s not just about private corruption. It’s about a complicated
relationship between the two, involving a range of public and private
actors in and out of government who seized control of the policy
machinery to achieve private ends at enormous public expense.