FOIA requests unearth documents exposing NIH’s massive censorship cartel during the COVID-19 pandemic

11/29/2024 / By Belle Carter

A report by investigative journalist Jimmy Tobias has exposed National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents proving that the agency implemented massive censorship during the onset of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020.

According to documents uncovered through Freedom of Information Act requests, Stanford University professor of medicine and health policy Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next NIH director, was targeted by then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins as a “fringe” epidemiologist for opposing COVID-19 lockdowns.

NIH is the main federal government agency that funded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology 2015 research into the original coronavirus, also known as Sars-Cov-1. The first outbreak of that happened in 2002-2004, and a decade later it was still being researched. Then, Sars-Cov-2 came almost as quickly as the vaccine. To this date, the origins of these coronaviruses are still being debated. One theory is that the Wuhan lab may have leaked it as it manipulated the original one.

Meanwhile, Tobias’ findings revealed that Lawrence Tabak, NIH principal deputy director under Collins’s leadership, showed up before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic not long ago as he was involved in potential censorship within NIH in January 2021.

Tabak was willing to discuss “a manuscript on gain-of-function research in light of the COVID-19 pandemic co-authored by National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences bioethicist David Resnik, who allegedly asked for then-Science Policy Director and Chief of Staff Carrie Wolinetz to review it,” a report said.

However, Wolinetz said the manuscript suggested “parity between unsubstantiated manmade and/or laboratory origin theories and peer-reviewed studies which provide scientific evidence that the virus is of natural origin” in a bid to tie the lab-leak theory to the NIH funding.

The manuscript only got published three years later and over a year into Wolinetz stepping down as Tabak’s senior adviser.

Journalist Alex Berenson, who strongly opposed the government’s motion to dismiss his censorship-by-proxy lawsuit, called this “as close to a smoking gun as we could hope to find now.” (Related: CDC, Facebook colluded to CENSOR COVID-19 vaccine safety FAQs, emails reveal.)

Big Tech could lose the liability shield powered by the Communications Decency Act

Meanwhile, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr said Big Tech companies Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Google parent Alphabet may lose their liability shield under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

According to Carr, this is because they failed to show “good faith” in their outsourced content-moderation decisions. He said they played “significant roles” in the “unprecedented surge in censorship” in recent years.

Carr also accused the tech giants of working with the administration of President Joe Biden and his self-appointed “media monitors” to “defund, demonetize and otherwise put out of business” media organizations that flouted certain narratives.

“For one, reports indicate that NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the [Chinese Communist Party] CCP as more credible than American publications. For another, NewsGuard aggressively fact-checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory. For still another, the Small Business Committee and multiple Media Research Center studies identified numerous instances where NewsGuard apparently does not apply its own ratings in an even-handed manner,” he posted on X, adding that the list goes on.

NewsGuard is under House Oversight Committee investigation and was reviewed in a House Small Business Committee report on the “censorship-industrial complex” this year.

Visit Censorship.news to read more stories related to the suppression of information back in the COVID-19 pandemic era.

Watch the video below that talks about the FCC commissioner’s plans to tackle Big Tech censorship.

This video is from the TrendingNews channel on Brighteon.com.