Moderna Is Spying on You

Moderna is spying on you.

No, not through chips inserted into your body, or by measuring quantum states in the spike proteins that your employer or government forced you to inject. As far as I know, the first never happened and in any case, both are impossible with current technology.

They do it the old-fashioned way, with gobs of money, lots of people, and tremendous computing power. And they go on to use the information they collect to manipulate social media conversations.

Moderna is spying on you. https://t.co/eJyR6Vcthe

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) November 20, 2023

The revelations come through an excellent story written by Lee Fang and Jack Poulson at UnHerd. I have been following Fang’s work for a while now, and it is always worth reading. I highly recommend reading the entire thing.

Fang and Poulson detail, for the first time, Moderna’s efforts to secretly shape the narrative on social media, funding an NGO that social media companies relied on to help them moderate information related to COVID-19 vaccines. Moderna would flag “dangerous information,” wash it through the NGO, and social media companies would use their guidance to amplify, deboost, or outright censor information that made people more hesitant to take the mRNA vaccines.

In many cases Moderna didn’t even try to dispute the claims or counter the arguments; they simply labeled them “misinformation.” And that was enough to silence the speakers.

Far from viral deception, much of the content flagged by Moderna as “misinformation” and a supposed danger to public health was nothing of the sort, it was legitimate discussion of vaccine-related issues. But the Moderna misinformation reports, reported here for the first time, reveal what the pharmaceutical company is willing to do to shape public discourse around its marquee product. And, even affect policy-making.

Nothing is surprising about a company trying to manage the narrative around its product. That is what corporate PR departments do for a living. What makes Moderna’s efforts scary is that they were able to do so with the cooperation of Big Tech, alliances with NGOs and government, and whitewashed through corporate-funded nonprofits. The public had no reason to believe that they were getting corporate propaganda, and efforts to inform the public of such a fact were simply suppressed.

Behind the scenes, the marketing arm of the company has been working with former law enforcement officials and public health officials to monitor and influence vaccine policy. Key to this is a drug industry-funded NGO called Public Good Projects. According to documents we have seen, PGP works closely with social media platforms, government agencies and news websites to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation”. A network of 45,000 healthcare professionals are given talking points “and advice on how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream”, according to an email from Moderna.

“Public Good Projects” sounds so benign, doesn’t it? Far better than “Billionaire Enrichment Corporation,” which doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Chances are good that the social media companies might have been a bit more reluctant to censor discussion of inconvenient facts or unpopular opinions if Moderna exercised its influence under its name. Even if it were inclined to the optics would be bad once it came out.

Similarly, government officials who surely knew that PGP was a Moderna shill, would rather have their subpoenaed emails be with a nonprofit than with Moderna government relations executives. So everybody involved was happy to have an NGO wash the requests for censorship through a third party.

Moderna’s disinformation arm is perpetuating the public discourse wars that have been raging since early in the pandemic, aimed at shutting down anything that might undermine Covid-19-related policies, including lockdowns and efforts to encourage mass vaccinations. These documents provide a new window into the process that has roiled speech debates over the last three years.

With PGP, Moderna is monitoring a huge range of mainstream outlets, as well as unconventional ones, such as the Steam online gaming community and Medium. Meanwhile, Moderna also retains Talkwalker which uses its “Blue Silk” artificial intelligence to monitor vaccine-related conversations across 150 million websites in nearly 200 countries. Discussions around “competitor” issues, including discussions of Pfizer are flagged as well as vaccine hesitancy.

Moderna, like the social media companies and the entire “misinformation” industry, has given life to CIA and FBI officials who have jumped into the corporate world at far better pay, and whose job is to shut up people. They are using the skills they acquired in government to manipulate public discourse, censor people, and liaise with government and massive corporations to shape the public discourse into something more congenial to the people who run the country.

Their monitoring team includes Moderna’s global intelligence division, which is run by Nikki Rutman, who spent nearly 20 years as an analyst with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Rutman was working from the FBI’s Boston office during the COVID-19 effort known as “Operation Warp Speed”, which involved the FBI conducting weekly cybersecurity meetings with the Boston headquartered Moderna. She is among many former law enforcement agents now with the vaccine maker. The involvement of former law enforcement reflects a wider trend in the misinformation-space, as the Department of Homeland Security and FBI have increasingly leaned on social media platforms to shape content decisions as a national security issue.

Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” was filled with ex-security state employees, and Facebook still employs vast numbers of them–in the hundreds. It is as if the security state simply moved a big chunk of their top people into social media and other Big Tech companies to accomplish tasks in the private sphere that would be prohibited by the First Amendment. Or, at the very least, be bad for their image.

It would have been shocking to see this a decade ago; today it is just the way business is done. Since at least 9/11 the security state has looked enviously at China’s control of its population and wondered how to accomplish the same goals without running afoul of the limits placed on their power; they appear to have discovered it, and corporations have jumped on the Narrative-control bandwagon.

None of the reports that we have seen makes any attempt to dispute the claims made. Rather the claims are automatically deemed “misinformation” if they encourage vaccine hesitancy. We approached Moderna for comment, but they didn’t respond.

“What often flies under the banner of combating disinformation is, in this case, nothing but corporate public relations, trying to spin public narratives in directions favorable to the corporation’s interests,” said Aaron Kheriaty, a bioethicist, and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Does anyone really want to live under a regime where their social media feed is essentially curated by government or by multinational corporate interests that stand to profit, influencing opinion on these issues?”

I could go on, but you really should read the article yourself rather than simply my ruminations on what it all means. Not that my ruminations aren’t worth the price of admission, but the investigative reporters who did all the legwork deserve your clicks and your attention. They are doing the harder work here.

Narrative control is just one tool being used to reshape society; add in other tools such as “de-banking,” doxxing people to undermine their employment prospects, and mandates to force people into doing things to which they object and you have a budding social credit system.

Which is exactly what they want to build, and are well on their way to building it. It’s not just Moderna; it’s the government and many other transnational corporations.