the revolving door: former FDA Commissioner Gottlieb and Pfizer

Former U.S. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who later became a member of the board at Pfizer – there is that revolving door again – bullied Twitter into censoring New York Times reporter and author Alex Berenson for questioning the safety and effectiveness of covid mRNA (messenger RNA) “vaccines.” This is one of the latest revelations to emerge from the so-called “Twitter Files,” an ongoing trove of truth bombshells that is quickly unraveling the covid scamdemic piece by piece. In essence, we now know that government-industry insiders pressured social media platforms like Twitter to censor and ban accounts that in any way defied the official covid story – Berenson’s being one of them. It was none other than Berenson himself who tweeted on January 9 that Gottlieb used the exact same Twitter lobbyist that the White House did “to suppress debate on Covid vaccines.” Berenson went on in the same tweet to thank billionaire electric vehicle (EV) guru Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, “for opening these files. In August 2021,” Berenson added in another tweet, “Gottlieb told Todd O’Boyle – a senior manager in Twitter’s public policy department – that a tweet from Dr. Brett Giroir claiming CORRECTLY that natural immunity was superior to vaccine immunity was ‘corrosive’ and might ‘go viral.'” That tweet was given a “misleading” tag to prevent it from being shared, after which Former U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Scott Gottlieb shifted his sights to a tweet from Justin Hart explaining that children almost never contract covid. That tweet was likewise slapped with a “misleading” label to stifle its visibility. All of this was happening around the time when Pfizer was desperately seeking authorization and approval for children to get jabbed with its covid injections. Gottlieb’s interference helped Pfizer to get that much needed authorization-approval, adding billions of dollars more to its profit streams. This past October, Gottlieb tried to play coverup by claiming on Twitter and on the financial fake news empire CNBC that he was never trying to suppress debate on mRNA injections. He just so happens to sit on the board of a company, Pfizer, that made $70 billion in profits on these shots. It is just a coincidence, Gottlieb wants us to believe, that he was actively working to suppress the spread of information that might hurt his company’s jab sales. Gottlieb was just trying to protect “public health,” he expects us all to now believe, and never had any vested interest in suppressing the truth. Gottlieb received $365,000 from Pfizer in 2021 for his work in suppressing free speech on Twitter – but this is not why he did it, Gottlieb now claims. No, Gottlieb is just a do-gooder who values human health and hates “misinformation,” he now expects us all to believe. “So many people need to swing for all the lies,” wrote a commenter about these latest Twitter Files revelations. wrote a commenter about these latest Twitter Files revelations. https://technocrats.news/2023-01-16-twitter-files-pfizer-gottlieb-lobbyist-censorship-covid.html …………………………. Dr. Scott Gottlieb served as the 23rd Commissioner of Food and Drugs on May 11, 2017 to April 5, 2019. Dr. Gottlieb is a physician, medical policy expert and public health advocate who previously served as the FDA's Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs and before that, as a senior advisor to the FDA Commissioner. In 2013 Dr. Gottlieb was appointed by the Senate to serve on the Federal Health Information Technology Policy Committee which advises the Department of Health and Human Services on healthcare information technology. Dr. Gottlieb was previously a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the New York University School of Medicine in Manhattan where he also practiced medicine as a hospitalist physician. He completed a residency in internal medicine at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, New York and is a graduate of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, where he studied Economics. https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-leadership-1907-today/scott-gottlieb  …………………. The following is a transcript of an interview with Dr. Scott Gottlieb that aired on Dec. 18. 2022 on "Face the Nation." MARGARET BRENNAN: Another thing Americans are watching closely: that surge of viruses inundating us this holiday season. Dr. Scott Gottlieb is a former FDA commissioner and a Pfizer board member and we welcome you back, Dr. Gottlieb.  SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Thanks a lot.  MARGARET BRENNAN: The White House says this is the worst flu outbreak in a decade. RSV, COVID they're surging. 77% of ICU beds in the country are currently full. How dangerous are these next few weeks? GOTTLIEB: It's going to be a difficult few weeks, we're right in the thick of respiratory pathogen season. That's the worst in recent memory. It's being driven largely by flu. This is a historic year for flu, probably the worst in the last decade, as you mentioned. COVID is exacerbating that. We also have an epidemic of respiratory syncytial virus which seems to be abating right now. Flu also seems to be peaking in certain parts of the country, it's rising in other parts of the country. It's decreasing in the South, rising in the North. And COVID is contributing to that. It's pressing families, it's also pressing hospitals, as you mentioned. 80% of hospital beds right now are full, the hospitals haven't been this full since the peak of the Omicron wave last winter. The difference is that last winter 25% of those hospital beds were filled with COVID admissions. Right now only 6% are filled with COVID admissions. So a lot of them are influenza admissions, and other respiratory pathogens like adenovirus, parainfluenza, all the things that plague us each winter, are coming back with a vengeance. MARGARET BRENNAN: A lot of bugs. But if the flu vaccine is such a good match, as you've said before, to this current strain, why are so many Americans getting sick? GOTTLIEB: Well, a lot of people aren't getting the vaccine, first of all. And we know the vaccine isn't 100% protective against infection. What the vaccine does in the setting of flu is reduce your chances of having a symptomatic infection and reduce your chances of having a severe outcome similar to how we're using it with COVID. The predominant strain of flu right now that's circulating is H3N2. The vaccine, as you said, is a very good match for that strain, maybe 60 to 70% protective. The other strain that's circulating is H1N1, about 20% of infections are H1N1. The vaccine is also a good match for that strain. And the difference between those two strains is that H3N2 typically peaks earlier in the winter. H1N1 may peak later. So it's not too late for people to get their flu vaccine. If people go out and get it now, they're going to have some immediate protection from it. And we could see a situation as we've seen in other winters where the predominant strain, the H3N2, starts to decline. And then H1N1 infection picks up.  MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the other thing particularly annoying parents of young kids like me is the shortage of antibiotics. Why don't we have enough supply? GOTTLIEB: It's really demand driven. So distributors made estimates on how much demand there would be this year. They've had lower demand the past two years because there was less bacterial infections because we were all taking certain steps to prevent the spread of disease. Demand went up this year, they anticipated some increase in demand, but not as much as we're seeing and not this early in the season. So it's not any kind of disruption in supply. This isn't like what we had with baby formula where manufacturers have been taken out of the market. This is a sophisticated supply chain, all the manufacturers are in the market. They just didn't anticipate this much demand this early in the season. Supply should catch up with demand and there are alternatives for things that are in shortage, like amoxicillin, the oral suspension of Tamiflu is also in shortage. Doctors and pharmacies can compound that from the capsules. So there are alternatives. It's just going to be difficult in some instances for families to get their hands on those alternatives. MARGARET BRENNAN: Yes. You know- I know- I know you're saying things are better versus where we were on the COVID front. But Dr. Fauci was on this program a few weeks ago, and he said he was tracking new COVID variants that evade the protection of monoclonal antibodies that are used for treatment and prevention. I know there's been studies on that that also say the same thing about the vaccine. What level of protection is there against these new variants? GOTTLIEB: Well, there was data out from the CDC on Friday that showed the vaccines providing good protection, particularly in the older individuals. The new vaccine. This- this new bivalent booster based on the new strain. So it's based on BA.5. What we're seeing right now is 40% of infections are BQ. 1.1, which is a derivative of BA.5, the strain that the vaccine is based on. About 30% of infections are BQ.1. There still should be good protection from the vaccine against those new variants. The one we're more worried about is a variant called XBB. So far, that's not spreading in the U.S. that much. It's about 5% of infections. It's held steady for about four weeks right now. That strain spread a lot in Asia, it didn't spread a lot in Europe. So it could be the case that BQ.1 and 1.1 crowd out XBB, but the concern is that if XBB continues to persist, you could see a second wave this spring. We don't think that's going to happen, but it's a possibility. But people are still gonna get good protection from the existing vaccines, the updated vaccine against the strains that are circulating right now. So the study that came out from CDC showed about 80- 70 to 80% protection from hospitalization from those over the age of 65. On top of the protection that they got from the old vaccine, so that's quite meaningful for a lot of individuals. MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to ask you about Title 42. In March of 2020, that was when the CDC director put this in place. It's a public health law to expel migrants in order to stop the spread of disease. That was the premise. Is there any public health reason to keep it in place now? GOTTLIEB: Well, look, I think as a matter of public health, we should be expiring a lot of these emergency measures that we've put in place. Not just Title 42, but also the national emergency that we put in place. I think what's happening is a lot of these are being extended to serve other policy and political goals. And that's ultimately going to undermine our ability to implement these public health measures in- in the future. If we need to have expedited removal of people crossing the border illegally, I think that should be contemplated in the context of broader immigration reform and as a matter of law enforcement but not as a public health measure at this point. I think all of these public health emergency measures that we put in place should be expired. MARGARET BRENNAN: Dr. Gottlieb, thank you so much, and I hope you stay healthy this holiday season.  GOTTLIEB: Thanks a lot.  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/scott-gottlieb-face-the-nation-transcript-12-18-2022/ ………………………….............. China’s top nuclear weapons research institute managed to obtain American-made semiconductors despite export rules banning the transfer of U.S. technology to organizations associated with the Chinese military, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. The China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP), which developed China’s first hydrogen bomb, has purchased American chips at least 12 times in the past two and a half years, the WSJ reported, citing procurement documents seen by the outlet. Although the U.S. blacklisted the academy in 1997, it has circumvented U.S. sanctions by obtaining the advanced chips from third-party sellers, according to the WSJ. Companies including Intel and Nvidia manufacture the semiconductors in question, which have broad applications in datacenters and personal computers, according to the WSJ. CAEP acquired the chips through the purchase of computer systems used to study computational fluid dynamics, a field of research that involves modeling nuclear explosions. (RELATED: China Recruited Scientists Who Worked At Top US National Security Lab, Report Says) The Commerce Department further expanded sanctions on CAEP in 2020, prohibiting the institution from obtaining items produced in the U.S. over concerns of its association with China’s military. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security also banned sales of equipment that can be used to manufacture the latest generations of semiconductors, measuring 10 nanometers and below, in 2020. Then, in October, it banned U.S. chipmakers from exporting chips to China with applications in AI and supercomputers, the WSJ reported. At least 34 research papers CAEP published referenced the use of American semiconductors in research for purposes such as analyzing data and generating algorithms, according to the WSJ’s review. Of those, seven could translate to measures used to maintain nuclear stockpiles, experts told the outlet….. Nvidia told the outlet the chips found in CAEP’s possession were commercially available, all-purpose graphics chips used in millions of personal computers worldwide. Intel said it complies with U.S. export restrictions. However, those restrictions are “insanely difficult to enforce,” trade lawyer and former Commerce Department official Kevin Wolf told the WSJ. https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/29/china-nuclear-weapons-semiconductors-export-ban/ ................. ………...