Moderna’s “disinfo department” monitors 150M websites for “anti-vaccine” narratives

12/04/2023 / By Ava Grace

The disinformation department of Massachusetts-based vaccine maker Moderna has partnered with external entities to monitor websites for “anti-vaccine” content.

Investigative journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson disclosed this development in a report. They noted that Moderna’s global intelligence department teamed up with the Public Good Projects, an industry-backed nonprofit. The Big Pharma firm also partnered with social media search, monitoring and analytics tool Talkwalker to monitor and suppress dissenting voices on Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine policy.

Former law enforcement agent Nikki Rutman, who spent 20 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, spearheads Moderna’s disinfo team. She previously worked in Boston during the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed (OWS).

During her OWS stint, Rutman conducted weekly cybersecurity meetings with Moderna. She eventually joined the vaccine maker, where part of her work is stopping “disinformation.” According to Fang and Poulson, Rutman produces reports that tag “anti-vaccine narratives” online and recommend steps to address them.

The investigative journalists’ report exposed key people behind the endeavor, LifeSiteNews said. Aside from this, the report disclosed that Rutman’s team – together with PGP and Talkwalker – deploys artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor 150 million websites worldwide for vaccine-related conversation.

Bhattacharya: Moderna bankrolls MEDICAL CENSORSHIP

The PGP is funded through a $1.27 million donation from the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a biotech lobbying group that represents Pfizer and Moderna. This led Stanford University professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to comment: “Moderna – through the PGP – pays thousands of health professionals to attack and defame vaccine critics and push social media to censor anyone who says things, true or false, that reduce profits.”

Fang and Poulson also wrote that the global intelligence team reports “anti-vaccine narratives” to Moderna staff, assessing the risk of each one through a color code. Low-risk narratives “don’t currently warrant any action,” while higher-risk narratives will call for the team to “notify the appropriate stakeholders with recommendations.”

“None of the reports that we have seen makes any attempt to dispute the claims made,” the two pointed out. “Rather, the claims are automatically deemed ‘misinformation’ if they encourage vaccine hesitancy.”

Moderna first began working with PGP on a program called “Stronger” that ran from 2021 to 2022. Under the program, the non-profit “identified misinformation and shaped content decisions on social media.”

The partnership was expanded in October with an official training program, developed by Moderna and PGP, alongside the American Board of Internal Medicine, to help healthcare workers identify medical misinformation. The online course, called the “Infodemic Training Program,” is a signal of an official partnership between biopharma and the NGO world.

“The network of fact-checking non-profits has grown at an industrial pace, providing opaque opportunities for private and public interests to take subtle control over the public discourse,” Fang and Poulson noted. “Such sophistication in blending public-health messaging and corporate advertising should concern anyone with an interest in how government controls free speech.”

Moderna has not successfully advanced any product to market prior to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine and was on the verge of collapse when the pandemic was announced. Its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine transformed the drugmaker into a $100 billion company almost overnight and turned its CEO, chairman and co-founders into billionaires. (Related: Heads of vaccine makers Moderna, BioNTech included in list of COVID-19 billionaires.)

Today, as interest in taking another booster shot wanes and subsidies are disappearing, so, too are profits. This has led to the company investing in new strategies – like a marketing campaign – to stay afloat, Fang and Poulson reported.

Visit BigPharmaNews.com for more stories about Moderna.

Watch Dr. Pam Popper discuss the business partnership between Moderna and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration below.

This video is from Wellness Forum Health channel on Brighteon.com.