Facebook requested the CDC’s signoff on its Covid-vaccine information page before the information was published, newly revealed emails between the two entities show, further demonstrating the extent of the coordination between Big Tech companies and the federal government on pandemic messaging.
In a May 2021 email chain obtained by America First Legal, Meta employee Genelle Adrien asked CDC spokesperson Carol Crawford for “additional edits” on Facebook’s draft FAQ section detailing the side effects of the Covid vaccine. Adrien worked on Facebook’s Politics and Government Outreach Team at the time, according to her LinkedIn page. Facebook was rebranded to Meta later that year.
Crawford, who participated in Covid-19 censorship on social media via Twitter’s Partner Support Portal, asked to remove “joint pain” from the list of side effects and add “nausea.”
In addition, she asked to remove a line from Facebook’s Covid-19 Information Center that stated: “More serious side effects are extremely rare. A person is far more likely to be seriously harmed by a disease than by its vaccine.” Those two sentences were scrapped after a separate CDC employee said the federal agency did not have “any cleared language . . . to support the second and third sentences,” Crawford said in her email to Adrien.
The admission is notable because the CDC did not confirm whether the vaccine was safer than contracting Covid-19 and developing natural immunity, AFL says.
“It is particularly troubling that the CDC sought to remove a statement contending the Covid-19 vaccine carried fewer risks than the disease itself,” AFL vice president Dan Epstein said in a statement to National Review. “Removing such a statement raises the specter that the CDC lacked a sound scientific basis for advocating widespread vaccination among the American public.”
“The lack of sound science in public health advocacy is dangerous and morally repugnant,” he added. “These documents reflect the concerns America First Legal has raised for several years: that the CDC engaged in a propaganda campaign with Big Tech companies to advance its political interests, not the best interests of all Americans.”
The CDC and White House continued pushing the vaccine and its subsequent boosters well after rolling out the initial shots in December 2020. One year later, President Joe Biden warned there would be a “winter of severe illness and death” for the unvaccinated.
The conservative legal group obtained the emails from its litigation against the CDC, which has played a role in determining what constitutes misinformation and disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines online.
“The 2021 email in question referred only to the fact that, at the time, we did not have language that had been vetted via CDC’s usual review process for public messages,” a CDC spokesperson told National Review. “That in no way means that there wasn’t data available to support the statements. In a year when there were 460,000 Covid-associated deaths in the U.S., the data were clear and unequivocal that getting vaccinated against Covid-19 was far safer than getting a Covid-19 infection.”
The spokesperson said only two serious yet rare types of health problems were discovered in the first four months of Covid-19 vaccination: anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction that can occur after any vaccination, and blood clots with low platelets that originated from the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen Covid-19 vaccine. This particular shot is no longer used in the U.S., the spokesperson noted.
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment about the emails in question.
The CDC was one of the defendants listed in Missouri v. Biden, a 2022 lawsuit that alleged the federal government colluded with social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to suppress freedom of speech on certain contentious topics.
A series of internal Facebook emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee confirm that the Biden White House placed significant pressure on the company to crack down on “misinformation” related to the Covid pandemic in early 2021.
The emails suggest that in some cases Facebook and Instagram complied with the White House’s content-moderation requests in order to avoid public and private backlash.
One April 2021 email sent by a Facebook employee on behalf of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged that, “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House.”
Last month, the Supreme Court rejected the challenge against the Biden administration due to the plaintiffs’ lack of standing to litigate the case, which was renamed Murthy v. Missouri. While ruling in favor of the federal government, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted in the majority opinion that the “defendants played a role in at least some” of the content-moderation decisions but also argued that the “platforms had independent incentives” to censor social-media posts.
Despite the setback, Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey announced on the day of the Court’s decision that he’s allowed to gather more evidence and depositions in the discovery process. Bailey continues to maintain that government officials coerced social-media corporations into censoring Americans.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect a statement from the CDC.