A new installment of the Twitter Files has revealed how the big pharmaceutical companies that made covid-19 vaccines pressured Twitter to censor activists calling for generic vaccines for countries with less resources.
According to the publications of the journalist Lee Fang. In the year 2020, there was an international agreement to make public the information that was emerging about the vaccines against the coronavirus, this was done with the intention of looking to create alternative generic and low-cost options and in doing so, countries with fewer resources could more easily access them and quickly resolve the health emergency that existed throughout the world.
But, according to the journalist's tweet thread, vaccine manufacturers took advantage of the crisis because they saw the moment as an opportunity for unprecedented profits and focused on preventing patent sharing requests from continuing.
"Behind closed doors, pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine, including therapeutics and vaccines," Fang said.
The journalist said that BioNTech, the German company that developed the covid-19 vaccine with Pfizer, was one of those who allegedly wrote to the Biden administration to demand sanctions against any country that attempted to violate patent rights by creating vaccines or generic covid drugs.
5. That brings us to Twitter. The global lobbying blitz includes direct pressure on social media. BioNTech, which developed Pfizer's vaccine, reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines. pic.twitter.com/6cVIRcUDZV
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
Also, the company reportedly approached Twitter to request censorship of users who made posts supporting low-cost vaccines.
"Twitter's reps responded quickly to the pharma request, which was also backed by the German government," Fang said.
7. The potential "fake accounts" that Twitter monitored for protesting Pfizer? These were real people. Here's one the Twitter team flagged for potential terms of use violations. I talked to Terry, a 74 year old retired bricklayer in the UK on the phone. https://t.co/qIH0Tngsm1
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
The journalist also reported that BioNTech decided to separately fund a special content moderation campaign with the intention of creating new review rules for posts related to coronavirus or "disinformation."
"The Moderna/Pfizer-funded campaign included direct regular emails with lists of tweets to takedown & others to verify," Fang shared these details along with some emails as evidence.
It should be recalled that this is not the first time Pfizer has been accused of having pressured Twitter to censor information. In fact, in another edition of the Twitter Archives reporter Alex Berenson reported that a top pharmaceutical company board member pressured the social network to take action against a publication that indicated that natural immunity against covid-19 was more effective than the vaccine.
