Before Covid hysteria and hatred for Donald Trump broke his brain, Adam Feuerstein was a pretty good reporter.

Feuerstein has covered Big Pharma for many years, since 2017 for an pharmaceutical and healthcare-focused Website called STAT. Among biotechnology investors, he’s widely read and sometimes feared. He has a long memory for the hyperbole (if not outright scams) that many biotech executives engage in as they struggle to develop new drugs.

So when Pfizer announced Dr. Scott Gottlieb - who had resigned as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration just months earlier - would be joining its board, Feuerstein’s salty take was not surprising:

SOURCE

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These days, though, Feuerstein has a somewhat different attitude towards Gottlieb, as a reverential interview from September 2021 reveals. It’s full of hardball questions like:

You have this unique position now – you were in government, you’re no longer in government. You sit on many different seats of power and access. Do you ever think about going back in?

(However do you do it all, Dr. G? And how do you look so good in that suit?)

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The irony here could not be thicker, as you have probably already realized. Because Feuerstein’s joking prediction of three years ago has turned out to be right. In August the FDA approved the bivalent boosters from Pfizer based on data from eight mice.

Can’t make it up.

One might think the fact the federal government has essentially become a promotional partner of the mRNA vaccine companies would encourage drug industry and investigative reporters like Feuerstein to ask hard questions about the vaccines.

One would be wrong.

For two years, reporters at elite and mainstream media outlets have done nothing but cheerlead for the vaccines and heap scorn on anyone who questions them.

Even the patent failure of the shots has not changed this dynamic. It has merely lead to more and more outlandish excuses and the rewriting of history that is barely history at all.

The most recent example is the idiotic argument over whether the mRNA vaccines were promoted last year as ending coronavirus transmission. Of course they were, despite the “fact-checker” claims to the contrary. In the spring of 2021, the Centers for Disease Control itself said “a growing body of evidence suggests that COVID-19 vaccines also reduce asymptomatic infection and transmission.”

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But worse - and more surprising, at least to me - is the fact that journalists have refused to stand up against or even note the censorship of debate over the vaccines. In some cases, they have actually encouraged it.

Their excuse has generally been that social media outlets are a private companies and can do whatever they like.

Putting aside the question of whether Twitter in particular is a “common carrier” that must carry all legal messages it receives, we know know that excuse is a lie. The companies have come under extraordinary public and private pressure from the Biden Administration and other government officials to suppress dissenting narratives.

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But now we ALSO know that - at least in my case - the pressure didn’t just come from the White House. Scott Gottlieb doesn’t work for the government anymore, though he remains in close touch with the Biden Administration, as he told STAT:

I have dialogue with members of the Biden administration. I have preexisting relationships with a number of people who are in roles right now where they have involvement in the response to Covid.

No, Scott Gottlieb works as a director for Pfizer, which pays him almost $400,000 a year for the privilege. Of course Gottlieb is worth every penny, given that Pfizer has sold about $70 billion of mRNA vaccines to governments around the world in the last two years.

And Gottlieb himself went to Twitter to complain that my writing was dangerous - yes, dangerous! - to Dr. Anthony Fauci. Gottlieb wasn’t worried that I was raising questions about a product that was worth more than almost all the other products Pfizer sold in 2021 combined, nosiree! He was worried about “Tony.”

I have this all in writing. I posted it here a few days ago. Gottlieb hasn’t even denied it.

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Aside from Fox News and a couple of other conservative outlets, the media response has been… silence. Crickets. Zilch. You get the idea.

I ask you, what would Adam Feuerstein and his colleagues say if I had been writing about climate coverage for the last couple of years and delivered proof that an ExxonMobil board member had asked Twitter to ban me because I was a security threat? Or if I had been writing about artificial intelligence and shown the same from a Google director?

You know the answer. We all do.

The hue and cry would be off the charts. A dozen investigative reporters would try to push the story. The op-ed pieces about corporate censorship would fly. On Twitter, reporters would call for Congressional inquiries and the more intemperate ones would demand criminal investigations.

Not here, though. The vaccines remain the most sacred of cows. The same reporters who spent 2020 and 2021 trying to tar and feather Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his correct and vindicated stance on school closures are now going after him and his surgeon general for discouraging men under 40 from taking more mRNA shots.

Apparently no one at New York magazine is aware that countries all over the world, including Norway - not exactly a bastion of conservatism - have gone even further.

So here we are. Journalists have not only given up on holding some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful companies - last year, even heads of state had to beg for Pfizer chairman Albert Bourla’s time - accountable. They are helping them silence any reporter who questions them.

Once upon a time I would have looked forward to seeing what Adam Feuerstein had to say about that.

Unreported Truths

What has happened to journalism, volume one…