A Note to Subscribers

And a note about evil, Pharma profits, and death in the Global South

Activists urge for equitable, global Covid vaccine access at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 2021. Photo: Caroline Brehman/Getty Images

This week has seen a number of developments, including the release of four new Twitter Files, several of great significance.

• Twitter Files 13 — Twitter and Covid
  Alex Berenson, January 9, 2023

• Twitter Files 14 — Russian Bots and #ReleasetheMemo Hashtag
  Matt Taibbi, January 12, 2023

• Twitter Files 14a — Supplemental — More Adam Schiff Ban Requests,
  and "Deamplification"
  Matt Taibbi, January 13, 2023

• Twitter Files 15 — How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy (Intercept version: “Covid-19 Drugmakers Pressured Twitter to Censor Activists Pushing for Generic Vaccine)
  Lee Fang, January 16, 2023

(Additional brief comments here.)

The final file, by Lee Fang, is especially troubling. It documents how Pfizer and BioNTech attempted to use Twitter to protect its profit from the activist campaign to get them to make their vaccines available free or at low cost to developing nations, especially in the Global South.

From his Intercept write-up:

The campaign they were concerned about was the launch of an international push to force the drug industry to share the intellectual property and patents associated with coronavirus vaccine development. Making the patents available, in turn, would allow countries across the world to swiftly manufacture generic vaccines and other low-cost therapeutics to deal with the ongoing pandemic. [emphasis added]

That’s evil in its purest form — choosing profits over people whose lives are at risk — with Big Pharma caught choosing its profits and consigning many brown-skinned others to death.

Thanks to the Twitter Files, we now have proof of this, not just suspicions. And only thanks to the Twitter Files, I hasten to add.

Unfortunately, this week I’m in transition. Next week I’ll send several posts covering these developments.

In the meantime, I have updated this file (“Twitter File Links, Aggregated”) with links to the above Twitter Files (along with a few comments), and will continue do so whenever a new file is released. It will always be up to date, so feel free to bookmark it.

Finally, Google may be getting into the content-flagging act. As you know, I’ve been covering the Twitter Files pretty extensively. If you search on my name, “thomas neuburger”, and narrow the search to include only “Previous week”, you see this flag ahead of the results:

Changing the filter to “Past month” removes the flag. Is this meaningful? I don’t know. But asking if I’m “trusted on this topic” is worrying.

I’ll have my own Twitter tale to tell, perhaps, if I can find data to support my suspicion. But for now, if you get the same result from a Google search, please let me know, either in the comments or by email.

Thanks again to you all. More soon.