The Censorious Scott Gottlieb Was a Major Influence on Lockdowns

The latest of the Twitter Files is reported by Alex Berenson, who was granted access to messaging systems from the times before Elon Musk took over. His first round of reporting concerns the role of Scott Gottlieb, who is a perfect example of an influencer who is technically outside of government but might as well be a powerful official within it.

Gottlieb’s main gig now is as a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, but he also serves as a board member of Pfizer. Before joining AEI and Pfizer, he headed the Food and Drug Administration under Trump from 2017 to 2019. Before that, he was at Health and Human Services as a member of its Federal Health IT Policy Committee from 2013 to 2017.

You probably know him from TV because he has been a ubiquitous presence since the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns, defending the government’s actions and pushing the vaccines from the company whose board he serves.

In August 2021, he wrote Twitter to complain about a tweet from his successor at the FDA, Brett Giroir. Giroir wrote to report the results of a study in Israel that clearly demonstrated what most anyone could have known even without the study: natural immunity is superior to vaccinated immunity.

Gottlieb complained that the tweet is “corrosive” and might “go viral.” Twitter acted by slapping a “misleading” tag on the tweet, one that still remains to this day.

Here is the email. 

Now, one might observe that Gottlieb is merely a private person and that it was certainly his right to object to anyone’s opinions. Maybe that’s true, except that he served Pfizer at the time and his company enjoyed billions in subsidies to make its product which not only gained a patent but benefitted from product-liability protection that is conventional with such vaccines. In addition, the product was only distributed thanks to an Emergency Use Authorization that bypassed the usual federal standards.

That aside, he had been massively influential on lockdown policies from the very beginning, urging the Trump administration to be as extreme as possible in its attack on civil liberties and...

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