dang unreal. Breathtaking, actually. But there was a HUGE amount of money at stake, so I guess we shouldn’t be so surprised that Moderna went to such lengths.
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.
It’s all just gobsmacking.
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.
…“This is an interesting peek behind the disinformation industry, what it actually does,” said Kheriaty, the bioethicist. ”It’s about controlling a narrative, controlling the flow of information, controlling how people think about public policy, like the vaccine mandate, and how people think about a particular product that a corporation is profiting from,” he added. “It’s deeply disturbing.”
Yes, it IS “deeply disturbing.” Very much so.