“FIVE FREEDOMS” – CITIZENS’ CORNER: Twitter’s Censorship of Dr Baric’s CV and of me
Censorship by social media giants is at an all-time high, and I should know: Twitter recently deplatformed me from my 145,000 followers. Twitter itself then slandered me across the globe: news reports mis-stated–via a Twitter spokesperson–that I’d been deplatformed for “vaccine misinformation.”
The First Amendment in the United States means that the government cannot outright censor critics or opponents; but the private sector — in this case Big Tech — is clearly aligned to do the dirty work of the administration.
I was accused of “Madness” (The New Republic), of having “always struggled with the truth,” of being an “anti-vaxxer.” Matt Goetz of Media Matters and CNN had charged me with “pushing increasingly bonkers conspiracy theories,” he did so on Twitter, a platform on which I am no longer able to respond directly to such attacks.
Yet, it seems my real crime has been asking questions reporters have failed to ask, and sharing information that challenges conventional thinking on the pandemic.
This very public silencing of a critic of pandemic-related “lockdowns” and —though I am not an “anti-vaxxer”—of the tyranny of medical coercion, was no doubt meant to chill other such critics, and it is working. I received countless emails from other reporters and influencers stating that they supported me, but were scared to say so publicly, lest they be deplatformed as well.
As important as it is to discuss how a public, CCP-style erasure of a Western critic by a social media company affects public interest speech across the board, and brings “social credit scores” tied to speech, to the former open West, I’m also still focused on the issues I was trying to bring to light when I silenced.
As Breitbart, RT and The Epoch Times accurately reported, I was actually deplatformed 24 hours after posting a video in which my husband, a private investigator, read a publicly available CV: that of Dr Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina.
Dr Baric’s CV details millions of dollars in funding from the NIH and NIAID, including funds for a ‘gain of function’ study. Dr Baric’s research, according to Vanity Fair, could be described as “Gain of Function” research. Indeed, Dr. Baric sat on a “Gain of Function” research committee.
This CV is troublesome to the Biden administration, current patron of Big Tech, and beneficiary of its current wave of censorship, because it creates links between this research and Dr. Fauci, who has become this administration’s brand centerpiece and key re-election strategy talking point.
Dr. Fauci stated directly to Senator Rand Paul in May 2021 that the NIH had NOT funded “gain of function research.” Indeed the NIH went even further when this question was raised, and denied ever funding research that would have made viruses more infectious to humans.
But Dr Baric’s CV shows evidence to the contrary. His research on coronaviruses in bats — finding that “synthetic recombinant bat SARS-like coronavirus is infectious” — and research on the transmissibility of coronaviruses to other species, including bats, mice, and humans, goes back many years. [You can see “McRoy, W. and Baric, RS. 2004. Mechanisms of coronavirus cross species transmission” on p. 14. “Becker, M.M., Graham, R.L., Donaldson, E.F., Rockx, B., Sims, A.C., Sheahan, T., Pickles, R., Corti, D., Johnston, R.E., Baric, R.S. and Denison, M.R. 2008. A synthetic recombinant bat SARS-like coronavirus is infectious in cultured cells and in mice” on p. 17.” “Rockx, B., Corti, D., Donaldson, E., Sheahan T., Stadler K., Lanzavecchia A., and Baric, R.S. 2008. Structural Basis for Potent Cross-Neutralizing Human Monoclonal Antibody Protection Against Lethal Human and Zoonotic SARSCoV Challenge” on p. 17.]
The CV of Dr Baric’s lab assistant E F Donaldson even more clearly details work done with Dr Baric to, as Donaldson puts it, “resurrect bat coronaviruses to determine the cross species transmission” and “I am currently employed as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, working in the lab of Dr. Ralph Baric. I am funded by the NIAID to conduct a study looking at the viruses in bats and studying how viruses cross the species barrier to emerge into new populations. In addition, I am working with Dr. Baric to resurrect bat coronaviruses to determine the cross species transmission potential of a variety of novel coronaviruses identified in bats.” The work detailed here took place when Dr Fauci was the NIAID director.
E F Donaldson also received hundreds of thousands of US tax dollars in NIH/NIAID funding to study bat coronaviruses’ cross-species’ infectiousness, in a bat roost with “seven to twelve” different species, located, alarmingly enough, right here at home — in Maryland: “Donaldson 9/12/09 – 8/31/11 NIH/NIAID $301,000 10% FTE Metagenomic Analysis of the virome of Eastern North American Bats. The major goals of this project are to define the virome of seven to ten different bat species that cohabitate in one roost in Maryland to determine the viral population of each and define the role of orthologous receptors to viral cross-species transmission.” That’s on p. 4.
E F Donaldson’s CV also notes a 2011-16 request to the NIH for $1.85 million in funding for SARS-related bat coronavirus cross-species infectiousness research: “Donaldson 07/01/11 – 06/30/16 NIH $1,850,000 25% FTE Cross species emergence of coronaviruses from bats. This work builds upon our ARRA grant, which allowed us to discover a novel Coronavirus in bats that is closely related to a human pathogen, human Coronavirus 229E. The major goals of the proposal are to characterize the coronaviruses found in bat species in the northeastern United States, by sequencing several bat fecal samples to determine the complete genomic sequences, isolate and/or synthetically resurrect these coronaviruses using in silico biology, and assess the ability of these viruses to emerge into the human host …”
That newsworthy grant, to see if bat coronaviruses could emerge “into the human host,” is on p. 5.
Dr. Fauci had stated flatly to Sen Paul, on national television , that he had not funded “gain of function” research. But Dr Baric himself described his research as “gain of function,” in a workshop linked to the NIH, called — wait for it — “Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain of Function Research.”
“Dr. Ralph Baric, University of North Carolina […] explained that GoF [Gain of Function] experiments for CoVresearch encompass a very diverse set of experiments that are critical to the development of broad-based vaccines and therapeutics.”
The video I posted of Dr Baric’s CV, which appears to directly contradict Dr Fauci’s claim to Senator Paul, had received 74,000 views when I was permanently suspended from Twitter.
It’s very serious that such a newsworthy and important piece of reporting — Dr Baric’s CV — got erased from our social media universe.
Republicans have been pressing for investigations of the origins of the coronavirus. Without Dr Baric’s CV, they do not have all the relevant information.
How is it that Twitter (and now Youtube, which also froze my account) went as far as heavy-handed, outright censorship of my findings? There is nothing in my sharing this information that presents misinformation as their spokesperson apparently reported to the press as the reason for banning me. The social media companies have yet to tell me what I posted that was inaccurate.
Sadly, Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook are now closely allied to the DNC and the Biden administration, which is one reason it is important to further unredact what Mark Zuckerberg had to say to Dr Fauci via email.
I’m a lifelong Democrat and I voted for President Biden, but in the wave of deplatforming of conservative voices after the Inauguration, I saw the danger to our system of this unholy alliance.
I don’t care much about personal attacks, or having been deplatformed. I won’t be bullied or silenced. But I do care that American citizens deserve a free press, press accountability, and open debate, and that they risk losing it due to censorship by Big Tech.
We deserve every bit of information that could allow for a better understanding of the gain of function research that may have been related to the virus that has debilitated world economies and affected millions, as does the rest of the world. Big Tech, with its compromised platforms, should have no say in whether such information survives a committee of millennials deciding, in an airy workspace, on what may or may not be read by other free peoples around the world.
Without a free press our country could not have been born. And if we allow random personal smears and Big Tech censorship of important news stories to derail our governance and to keep our people ill-informed, our state of liberty cannot survive.
Thank you for your continued fight to illuminate.