NVIC Back Up On Twitter @NVICLoeDown

On Feb. 10, 2023, the National Vaccine Information Center’s (NVIC) Twitter account was re-established and the first tweet I sent out for sharing was this one:

Thank you, Elon Musk, for liberating @NVICLoeDown established in 2010 by the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a charity founded in 1982 to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education. The right to autonomy is the first human right. Break every chain! Barbara Loe Fisher.

It has been almost two years since the @NVICLoeDown Twitter account, established in 2010, was abruptly suspended on May 23, 2021 before Elon Musk acquired the large social media platform with 400 million users on Oct. 27, 2022.¹ The elimination of NVIC’s presence on Twitter by previous administrators was part of a coordinated effort in 2021 by political operatives, legacy media outlets, government officials and all four major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and You Tube, to silence NVIC’s voice and many others critical of vaccine science, policy and law online.²

It was a censorship campaign led by players with financial ties to the pharmaceutical and medical trade industries and government,³ which began in 2020 to curtail freedom of speech about the origin and nature of the new coronavirus and escalated in 2021 to include a prohibition on free speech about the risks and failures of COVID vaccines.⁴ NVIC had been messaging for several decades about the growing threat to freedom to dissent related to public health policy and law, and NVIC’s significant presence on Facebook and other social media platforms in 2020 and early 2021 was an early focus of orchestrated de-platforming campaigns.^{5 6}

NVIC De-Platformed from Major Social Media in Seven Months

On Mar. 2, 2021, Facebook began the systematic de-platforming of NVIC from social media between March and September, followed by the deactivation of NVIC’s PayPal account in December. NVIC had hosted a Facebook page since 2008 and had more than 200,000 fans when it was eliminated.⁷ Instagram, which is owned by Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), was the next NVIC account to go on Apr. 23, 2021. On May 23, Twitter suspended the @NVICLoeDown account, which NVIC had maintained since 2010.

On Sept. 30, YouTube suspended the NVICStandUp channel, which NVIC had sponsored since 2007 and contained hundreds of video commentaries and archival television news reports and debates on vaccine safety and informed consent issues with nearly two million lifetime views. We are in the process of rebuilding that video library on Rumble.

Google, which owns YouTube, is the biggest Internet search engine in the world and is owned by Alphabet, one of the world’s largest technology conglomerates.⁸ In the second decade of the 21^st century, Google has been applying suppressive algorithms to individuals and organizations posting online when administrators target them for censorship, such as those Google considers purveyors of “coronavirus misinformation.”^{9 10 11}

U.S. Representatives of One Party Call on PayPal to Defund NVIC

On Dec. 23, 2021, without warning and no explanation, PayPal closed NVIC’s account. This action immediately blocked NVIC supporters from making a donation to NVIC through Network for Good, which had processed donations to NVIC through PayPal without interruption since 2013.^{12 13 14 15}

I later learned that Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss had sent a letter on Dec. 15, 2021 to the CEO/Owner of PayPal signed by 17 Democrat representatives in the House of Representatives, including California Representative Adam Schiff, then chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.¹⁶ In the letter, the lawmakers alleged that PayPal had “played a role in financing vaccine disinformation spreaders” and listed NVIC as a “leading” contributor of “COVID-19 disinformation,” citing a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). They asked PayPal to deactivate NVIC’s account by blocking all donations from the public to our small charity that has been working to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education since 1982.¹⁷

A U.K. Political Operative Targets NVIC

Imran Ahmed, who is a U.K. political operative and former advisor to the leftist British Labor Party and founded the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in 2020, appears to have influenced the U.S. lawmakers who sent the letter to PayPal.  A shadowy non-profit organization that fails to publicly disclose its funding sources, CCDH is listed as a “non-profit” headquartered in London and has formed a 501C3 charity in the U.S. with an office in the Washington, DC area.¹⁸ Influence Watch describes CCDH as a “censorship advocacy group”¹⁹ and Wikipedia says CCDH runs “campaigns” lobbying “big tech firms to stop providing services to individuals who may promote hate and misinformation, including neo-Nazis and anti-vaccine advocates.”²⁰

Ahmed is an expert in throwing disparate individuals and organizations into the same basket, particularly for the purpose of suggesting they are “bad actors” and neo-Nazi “hate” groups fond of racism and white supremacy; identity-based hate; misogyny; denial of science, including climate change; health disinformation and conspiracy theories that “cause considerable world harm.” He has a particular distaste for anyone criticizing government approved narratives about vaccines and says that “CCDH has forced social media companies to establish precedent and remove hateful or dangerous content.”²¹

Soon after founding CCDH, Ahmed wrote a report targeting NVIC for elimination from social media after NVIC held the Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination online in October 2020, a report that was well-publicized in the U.S. and Europe.^{22 23} In the December 2020 “Anti-Vax Playbook” report,²⁴ Ahmed deceived readers through propagation of false facts and disinformation. He defamed speakers at NVIC’s open public conference, which featured credentialed physicians, scientists, attorneys, legislators, theologians, bioethicists, journalists, and informed consent advocates, calling them “malignant actors.” Blatantly spreading disinformation, he inferred that NVIC’s well publicized conference was a conspiratorial gathering of “leading digital anti-vaccine advocates at a meeting they recently held in private over three days.”

On Dec. 9, 2021, Ahmed appeared as an expert witness on “the dynamics of misinformation and hate on social media, how it undermines democracy, the rule of law, child safety, and our ability to deal with life-threatening crises such as COVID“ at the U.S. House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce Hearing: Holding Big Tech Accountable to Build a Safer Internet.²⁵ That was after NVIC had been removed from all four major social media platforms and two weeks before Rep. Auchincloss and his colleagues sent a letter to PayPal to deactivate NVIC’s PayPal account.

Freedom is Not Free: Break Every Chain

There are a number of bona fide “malignant actors,” as well as individuals simply too uninformed or afraid to oppose propaganda and oppression, who played a role in orchestrating an historic assault on freedom of thought and speech and the constitutional right to dissent in America over the past three years. They did it marching under the “science” flag, arguing that forced masking and lockdowns and vaccination was being done in the name of public health and for the collective greater good. Hindsight is 20/20 but, as the dust settles in 2023, the question does need to be asked: what would have happened if free speech on the Internet—the virtual global public square—had not been crushed by those with financial and political incentive to silence individuals and organizations that were offering a different perspective?

It is a good sign that the new administrators of Twitter, now led by a free speech advocate, Elon Musk, have restored the @NVICLoeDown account. At NVIC, we will continue to educate the public on Twitter about the urgent need to reform the public health system by making the prevention of vaccine injury and death and protection of informed consent rights a priority.²⁶ We will continue to urge all Americans to get responsibly involved in government at every level—local, state and federal—to make our Constitutional Republic a nation with laws that work for and protect the biological integrity and human rights of all the people.

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