RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
January 14 to January 20, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations and on LeeFang.com, Lee Fang reports on pharma giant Moderna's sprawling media operation targeting critics of vaccine policy and the drug industry -- an effort exposed in a series of internal company reports and communications reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. -
The reports show that Moderna has worked with former law enforcement and public health officials and a drug industry-funded NGO called Public Good Projects (PGP) to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation.” -
The efforts include an “Infodemic Training Program” and talking points going out to some 45,000 healthcare professionals “on how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream.” -
The company has also used artificial intelligence to monitor millions of global online conversations including high-profile vaccine critics, particularly those in independent media, including Michael Shellenberger, Russell Brand and Alex Berenson. -
PGP helped facilitate the removal of content from Twitter, among other social media platforms, throughout 2021 and 2022. Emails show PGP routinely sent Excel lists of accounts to amplify and others to deplatform from Twitter, including populist voices such as ZeroHedge. -
The red flags, which may be typical of corporate public relations efforts that want their product shown in the best light, take on a darker cast when it involves medicine injected into people’s bodies. -
Like the Twitter Files, the Moderna Reports show the growth of what has been called the censorship industrial complex.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Social Security Denies Cash to Widows, RCI
Calif. Tax Credits for 'Harmful' Teen TV, RCI
Heritage Areas a $29M Boondoggle, RCI
Take Us to Your Extraterrestrial Cash, RCI
$24.3M for NYC Mayor's 293 Assistants, RCI Federal investigators asked banks to search and filter customer transactions by using terms like "MAGA" and "Trump," Dick's Sporting Goods, Cabela's, and Bass Pro Shops as part of an investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol unrest. Investigators also warned that purchases of "religious texts" could indicate "extremism," the House Judiciary Committee revealed in a letter obtained by Fox News Digital: House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said the documents obtained by the committee indicate that after Jan. 6, 2021, the Treasury Department’s Office of Stakeholder Integration and Engagement in the Strategic Operations of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, distributed materials to financial institutions that outlined "typologies" of "various persons of interest" and provided the banks with "suggested search terms and Merchant Category Codes for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement." … [Jordan wrote]: "According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of ‘extremism’ indicators that include ‘transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel areas with no apparent purpose,’ or ‘the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.’” "In other words,” Jordan wrote, “FinCEN used large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression." Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Leftwing Groups' Plans to Kneecap 'Dictator' Trump in 2d Term, NBC
Biden’s Secret Surveillance Court, Politico
Virginia County Finds 4,000 Misreported 2020 Votes, The Hill
Hunter's Art Dealer Says Joe Biden Met With Him, Just the News
Coke Found on Hunter Biden's Gun Pouch, Associated Press
Biden Border Crisis: Crossings Rise 277% From Trump Era, Daily Mail
Feds' $700K to Warn Trans 'Boys' They Can Still Get Pregnant, Daily Wire
Union War on Gig Workers Goes National Under Biden, City Journal
'No Labels' Tells DoJ of Largely Leftist Conspiracy Against It, No Labels Other Noteworthy Articles and Series The folks that probably brought us COVID-19 have been frighteningly busy. This article reports that Chinese scientists have been experimenting with a mutant coronavirus strain that is 100 percent lethal in mice – despite concerns such research could spark another pandemic: Scientists in Beijing – who are linked to the Chinese military – cloned a Covid-like virus … and used it to infect mice. The mice had been 'humanized', meaning they were engineered to express a protein found in people, with the goal being to assess how the virus might react in humans. Every rodent that was infected with the pathogen died within eight days, which the researchers described as 'surprisingly' quick. The team were also surprised to find high levels of viral load in the mice's brains and eyes - suggesting the virus, despite being related to Covid, multiplies and spreads through the body in a unique way. The research is worrying many scientists. Professor Francois Balloux, an infectious disease expert based at University College London, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “It's a terrible study, scientifically totally pointless. I can see nothing of vague interest that could be learned from force-infecting a weird breed of humanized mice with a random virus. Conversely, I could see how such stuff might go wrong. ...” In a separate article, the Wall Street Journal reports Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes COVID-19 in late December 2019, “at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world. … The extra two weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defenses and get started on an eventual vaccine.” The new information does not shed light on the debate over whether COVID emerged from an infected animal or a lab leak The fast-food industry is fueling a surge in child labor violations across the U.S, especially at companies with franchised locations such as McDonald’s, Sonic and Chick-fil-A. A Washington Post analysis of federal data found that, in response to pandemic labor shortages, fast-food companies have hired children 13 or younger and “illegally scheduled thousands of teenagers to work late and long hours and to operate dangerous kitchen equipment”: Overall, child labor violations have more than tripled in the past 10 years, with violations in food service increasing almost sixfold, according to The Post’s analysis of U.S. Labor Department data. In the first nine months of 2023, agency officials found more than 4,700 teenagers under 18 working in violation of federal child labor laws — more than three-quarters of those in food service. … Major chains that depend on the franchise business model have much higher rates of violations than those that don’t, such as restaurant companies that primarily own and operate their own stores, The Post found. Post interviews with young workers found no evidence that they were forced to take their jobs or work long hours. “In 2018, Tyler Karpinsky got a job at age 15 at a Vermont McDonald’s that was later cited by the Labor Department for overworking teenagers. Initially, Karpinsky intended to save up for a trip to Europe with his mom. But his pay – around $11 an hour – ended up helping his family with heating bills, groceries and other utilities. Soon, he was working for more than three hours on school nights, he said – missing dozens of assignments, dozing off in class, tanking his grades and threatening his college prospects.” Keith Harward spent 33 years in jail for rape and murder. The only evidence connecting the former sailor, this article reports, was the testimony of two forensic dentists who told two separate juries that Harward’s teeth matched “to a scientific certainty” a bite mark on the rape victim’s skin. Fortunately, DNA science eventually exonerated him. Haward is not alone: Harward is among at least 36 people who have been exonerated after having been wrongfully convicted based on now-debunked bite mark comparisons. One of them, Eddie Lee Howard, was on death row in Mississippi when he was freed in 2021 after crime scene DNA was matched to someone else. Four separate governmental scientific bodies have concluded that bite mark analysis has no basis in science. That includes the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which said in 2016 that “available scientific evidence strongly suggests that examiners not only cannot identify the source of bitemark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bitemark.” Nevertheless, this article reports, bite mark analysis has been used in thousands of cases. And while it has increasingly been successfully challenged by defense lawyers, no court has ruled it inadmissible. In a separate article, the Intercept reports that Missouri is on track to execute a man named Marcellus Williams even though his conviction rested largely on the testimony of a jailhouse informant and former girlfriend who both resolved some of their legal difficulties by fingering Williams. In addition, “DNA testing on the murder weapon done years after his conviction revealed a partial male profile that could not have come from Williams.” From the Annals of the Promise and Perils of Technology, more than 3 million Americans enjoy better health thanks to cardiac pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators implanted in their chests. These electronic devices, however, also make their bodies vulnerable to hackers. In this article, J.D. Tuccille, who has a cardiac pacemaker, reports: Increasingly, the devices are remotely accessible so that they can transmit health data to medical professionals and be fine-tuned for the needs of specific patients. In practice, that can be both fascinating and helpful; after I walked up and down the hallway, a representative of the manufacturer used a tablet to remotely tweak my pacemaker settings to be more responsive to my level of exertion. Athletes often have their pacemakers set differently for competitions than for everyday life, he told me. From time to time, a base station next to my bed automatically queries my pacemaker, downloads stored information about my heart function, and sends it off through the cell network to be reviewed. But a medical device that can be remotely accessed for good reasons is also potentially vulnerable to malicious intrusions. The tradeoffs between the life-saving potential of remotely accessible medical devices and the vulnerability of technology have been discussed for years—though concerns sometimes get steamrolled. Although this article does not report any widespread hacking efforts on these devices, Tuccille worries about the intrusions of more benign actors: I have a cardiologist who already told me he thinks I exercise too much. Is he going to review the data and second-guess my habits? Is my snitching medical device going to inspire nagging sessions with doctors, perhaps followed by nastygrams from my insurance company or government agencies about lifestyle choices and resulting costs? Technological capabilities are racing ahead, but conversations about the implications lag well behind. |
