Sen. Ron Johnson is accusing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of abusing its authority by coordinating with social media platforms to censor information about COVID-19 vaccines.
The Wisconsin Republican referenced social media posts about vaccines, including one of his own, that were characterized as misleading.
In a letter he sent earlier this week to Dr. Mandy Cohen, CDC director, he called for critical documents and materials about the efforts to suppress vaccine information from the public through social media.
“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,’” Mr. Johnson wrote in the letter.
He cited his own social media post on the platform now known as X, which was labeled as “misleading” when the social media site was called Twitter.
“On January 3, 2022, I wanted to share with the public information from the U.S. government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) regarding the COVID-19 vaccines. In a tweet, I examined and compared government data on the number of adverse events reports associated with COVID-19 vaccines, medications used to treat COVID-19, and non-COVID-19 medications,” he wrote.
“After I tweeted the information from my official U.S. Senate Twitter account, Twitter labeled it ’misleading’ and blocked all replies, shares, or likes for the tweet,” Mr. Johnson said.
The senator’s post says that VAERS data showed 1 million adverse effects from COVID-19 vaccines. The “misleading” label on the post countered that most public health officials said that the vaccines are safe.
Since Twitter changed ownership and its name to X, it has also moved to a Community Notes protocol that deploys a crowdsourced system to handle potentially incorrect posts on the platform.
In response to Mr. Johnson’s inquiry about why the Big Tech company censored him and others, X’s most recent management said Executive Branch officials, particularly from the CDC communicated with social media companies, including Twitter, “about ’COVID Vaccine Misinformation.’”
Mr. Johnson also revealed that X employees noted that the “CDC identified ’misleading information about VAERS reports’ as a specific subset of ’COVID Vaccine Misinformation,’ which they encouraged social media companies to address.”
“The information Twitter provided showed a clear and concerted effort by the CDC to censor those who tweeted about VAERS data,” Mr. Johnson wrote.
Mr. Johnson, who serves as the top Republican on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wants all the records showing the communications between all CDC employees and employees at X, Facebook, and YouTube about 10 people who discussed vaccine and lockdown-skeptical stances starting Dec. 1, 2019.
This includes: Mr. Johnson, Brianne Dressen, John Ioannidis, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pierre Kory, Theresa Long, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch and Aaron Siri.
He also demanded records relating to the CDC’s interactions with companies in the private sector, and other third-party groups, such as nonprofit organizations, regarding disinformation, misinformation, disfavored speech, content moderation, any form of censorship or suppression of online speech, or the development of COVID-19 misinformation policies.
Mr. Johnson also asked for documents 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.”
The Wisconsin Republican gave the CDC Director a deadline of Sept. 11 to deliver this material.
The Washington Times reached out to the CDC for comment but did not immediately hear back.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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