Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of coordinating with social media companies to suppress certain information about COVID-19 vaccines.
Citing one of his own social media posts about vaccines that got labeled misleading, Johnson claimed the agency had abused its authority and demanded it fork over key documents about the efforts in a Monday letter to CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen.
“Based on recent information I have received … it is clear that CDC abused its authority by engaging in a censorship campaign to suppress and discredit certain viewpoints it labeled as ‘misinformation,'” Johnson wrote in the letter, obtained by The Post.
As an example, Johnson highlighted a Jan. 3, 2022, post he made on Twitter, now known as X, that highlighted information from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
In the post, Johnson claimed that VAERS data showed there had been over 1 million adverse effects from the COVID-19 jab. That post was labeled misleading on the platform with a note explaining that most public health officials had deemed the vaccines safe.
All replies, shares, or likes stemming from that post were then blocked by the platform, according to Johnson. Since then, X has switched to a “Community Notes” system that crowdsources corrections to potentially misleading posts.
The platform’s new leadership later explained to Johnson that executive branch officials, particularly from the CDC, “communicated with social media companies, including Twitter, about ‘COVID Vaccine Misinformation,'” the senator wrote.
“The information Twitter provided showed a clear and concerted effort by the CDC to censor those who tweeted about VAERS data,” Johnson added.
Johnson, the ranking member on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, is demanding records detailing interactions between all CDC employees and employees at X, Facebook, and YouTube regarding 10 individuals who expressed vaccine and lockdown-skeptical views beginning Dec. 1, 2019.
Those 10 include Johnson himself, Brianne Dressen, John Ioannidis, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Pierre Kory, Theresa Long, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, and Aaron Siri.
The Wisconsin senator is also requesting all records pertaining to CDC interactions with both private sector companies and federal agencies about suppression of online speech or COVID-19 misinformation policies.
He is also seeking records about “Be On the Lookout” topics and a list of all social media posts the CDC flagged as “containing misinformation, disinformation, or generally disfavored speech.”
Johnson gave the CDC a Sept. 11 deadline to comply. The agency did not return The Post’s request for comment, but has noted in the past that VAERS relies on reports submitted by individuals rather than health officials.
“VAERS is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem but is especially useful for detecting unusual or unexpected patterns of adverse event reporting that might indicate a possible safety problem with a vaccine,” read an advisory to the social network included in Johnson’s letter.
In the letter, Johnson also laid out a timeline laying out the sequence of events in the run-up to his tweet about VAERS.
“It appears that CDC’s efforts to coordinate with Twitter to discredit posts about VAERS shortly followed my own public statements about VAERS data and the mainstream media’s condemnation of my remarks,” he wrote.
Content moderation policies on social media platforms have long been a rallying cry for conservatives who complain they have been unfairly censored.
In the House, Republicans led by Subcommittee on Government Weaponization Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have been probing social media policies.
Johnson has also been scrutinizing other actions by government health agencies surrounding the pandemic.
Earlier this month, he asked the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general whether government scientists concealed critical information about COVID-19 from the public.
https://nypost.com/2023/08/30/sen-johnson-lambasts-cdc-demands-docs-on-censorship-of-vaccine-data/
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