Journalist who warned about COVID jabs says White House officials targeted him for censorship

Sections

Prominent reporter and author Alex Berenson, who became well-known among conservatives for speaking out against the “dangerous” and “ineffective” COVID-19 injections, said in a recent Substack post that White House officials had specifically asked Twitter to censor him last year.

(Article by Ashley Sadler republished from LifeSiteNews.com)

According to Berenson, internal messages he obtained “make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech.”

In an August 12 Substack post, the author and former New York Times reporter said that officials within the Biden administration had “asked Twitter to ban me because of my tweets questioning the Covid vaccines, even as company employees believed I had followed Twitter’s rules.”

Berenson backed up his claims with screenshots of internal communications between Twitter staffers using the communication platform Slack. According to Berenson, the Slack messages were obtained as part of the settlement after he filed a federal lawsuit against Twitter.

My new Stack, on the White House's explicit demand that Twitter ban me, months before it did.

This is state action and a violation of my First Amendment rights, period.

Berenson v. Biden (and Slavitt), coming soon to a federal court near you. https://t.co/IVBWspnKoo

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) August 12, 2022

In one message obtained by Berenson, a Twitter employee reportedly spoke about an April meeting with White House officials, saying, “They really wanted to know about Alex Berenson.”

“They had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off the platform,” one message read.

Citing Andy Slavitt, who occupied a role as a White House COVID adviser before leaving the Biden administration in June 2021, a Twitter employee said officials “had seen data viz [visualization] that had showed [Berenson] was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.”

Berenson said the Slack messages suggest the Twitter employees felt pressured “to respond to the government’s questions about whether the company was doing enough to suppress ‘misinformation’ about Covid and the vaccines.”

“An employee writes that the questions at the meeting were ‘pointed’ but ‘mercifully, we had answers,’” Berenson said.

In his Substack post, Berenson quoted another Slack post from an employee who claimed to have “taken a pretty close look at his account and I don’t think any of it’s violative.”

Regardless, “the pressure on Twitter to take action against me and other mRNA vaccine skeptics steadily increased after that April meeting,” Berenson wrote, pointing out that as the summer approached, the Biden administration drew closer to mandating the experimental shots.

In mid-July 2021, he noted, the Biden administration suggested that Facebook was “killing people” by permitting people to speak out against the shots.

“A few hours after Biden’s comment, Twitter suspended my account for the first time,” Berenson said.

Just a month later, in August, Twitter banned Berenson for a tweet in which he argued that the COVID-19 injection is not truly a “vaccine” because “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission.”

“Don’t think of it as a vaccine,” Berenson wrote. “Think of it — at best — as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”

Berenson filed a lawsuit against Twitter in federal court in December 2021.

He has since reportedly settled with the Big Tech company, which has restored his account and acknowledged that his tweets “should not have led to his suspension at that time.”

In January 2022, CDC director Rochelle Walensky herself admitted that, as Berenson noted in his August, 2021 tweet, COVID injections did not stop transmission of or infection with the virus.

LifeSiteNews reached out to the White House and Twitter for comment but has yet to hear back.