Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky celebrated her institution’s efforts to censor Americans, including those who didn’t toe the government line on COVID-19, as she left her position.
Walensky left the CDC at the end of June after a controversial 2 ½ year tenure during the COVID-19 pandemic. But in one of her last interviews to The Wall Street Journal as director, she touted the CDC’s ongoing censorship efforts that, under her directorship, worked to combat so-called “misinformation.”
Under Walensky, the CDC colluded with Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta to censor COVID-19 information on its platforms.
The Journal reported that according to Walensky “the CDC has a plan that would help it regain trust and forestall misinformation by taking a defensive approach to public-health messaging.” That often means censorship, of course.
The Journal added that this “‘prebunking’” effort, as Walensky called it, “includes brainstorming potential avenues of misinformation before releasing public-health reports, and making clear to media outlets what details could be misconstrued.” CDC censorship efforts previously took a more direct form with Meta, though.
Ironically, it appears that neither Walensky nor The Journal addressed the issue that some content censored during COVID turned out to be true, despite what government agencies and tech companies said at the time.
Reason senior editor Robby Soave tweeted “THE FACEBOOK FILES” thread on Jan. 19, uncovering the CDC’s “significant influence” over COVID-19-related censorship on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram. Soave linked to an article he wrote based on documentation Reason obtained through a lawsuit brought by the Missouri and Louisiana attorney generals against the Biden administration and other government agencies. That lawsuit uncovered a “vast censorship enterprise”.
Soave labeled the CDC the “Speech Police” for its frequent and even daily consultations with Meta about trending topics and what content should be considered “false or misleading.” In May 2021, CDC officials reportedly “began routinely vetting claims” on Facebook about COVID-19 origins and vaccines, with the platform allowing the government bureaucrats to determine what posts were accurate, Soave tweeted. Facebook thanked the CDC for its “‘help in debunking.’” After that Big Tech-CDC collusion, Walensky seems to be aiming for more of the same.
“‘Be on guard against misinformation and the politicization of science,’” Walensky pontificated to Americans, according to The Journal. But the CDC and Meta’s collusion to censor people for having different opinions on the pandemic was in fact a gambit to politicize “science.” The CDC’s “prebunking” and other potential censorship activities should end, to safeguard Americans’ free speech.
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