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Posted on 10/20/2026 7:13:24 AM PDT by Red Badger
The Biden administration wasn't just trying to police COVID posts. It wanted broader control over health information, and newly released internal documents show former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's office was actively strategizing how to make it happen.
The documents Protect the Public's Trust obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) date back to 2021, when the Biden administration was already pushing Facebook and other technology companies to remove content it labeled misinformation.
One exchange from May 2021 is particularly revealing.
Murthy's policy adviser, Daniel Tartakovsky, suggested that the administration's efforts should reach considerably further than COVID.
"May be worth emphasizing that you don’t just see this as a COVID-related issue (i.e., it’s health and medical misinformation, not just COVID-related misinformation). More broadly, it gets at the issue of how social media impacts people, especially young people."
So much for the temporary emergency justification. Officials were already considering a much larger role for the federal government in deciding what Americans should be allowed to discuss.
Another memorandum, prepared for Murthy's "misinformation tiger team" (yes, that was a real thing), outlined an approach involving "maximum pressure" on social media companies. It also celebrated the temporary suspension of then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's account as "momentum" toward removing more accounts.
The same memorandum acknowledged that the campaign could politicize the Surgeon General's office by involving it in a "social media/censorship war."
Apparently, that wasn't enough to discourage anyone.
This wasn't simply a matter of issuing public health guidance. A 2024 House Judiciary Committee investigation concluded that White House pressure influenced moderation decisions at Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon. Committee Republicans found that the material targeted included satire, factual information, and posts that hadn't violated the companies' own policies.
The Biden administration was so busy policing misinformation that even accurate information wasn't necessarily safe.
And Murthy's office had been leaving fingerprints on the process for years.
Earlier documents released by Protect the Public's Trust showed his staff preparing talking points for interviews in July 2021. Those materials acknowledged that officials were flagging posts for social media companies and requesting policy changes from Facebook.
Murthy also received prepared responses to criticism of the government's involvement. Asked whether the campaign amounted to cancel culture, his suggested answer was that it was actually the opposite.
Naturally.
Protect the Public's Trust Director Michael Chamberlain, commenting on the previously released records, offered a considerably different assessment:
"The foundation of the COVID arm of the Censorship Industrial Complex during the Biden administration was their obsession with so-called 'misinformation.' But the tragically ironic part was that much of the actual misinformation was coming from inside their house."
The administration's behavior eventually landed in court. The Supreme Court punted in 2024, dismissing Murthy v. Missouri without touching the First Amendment questions at its core. A settlement reached afterward put some limits on the Surgeon General's office, CDC, and CISA, but narrow ones, and the constitutional questions remain unresolved.
But the latest documents leave little doubt about what officials were discussing behind closed doors. The Biden administration wanted technology companies to become more aggressive about controlling health-related speech, and its own staff recognized the political nature of the campaign.
Americans were told this was about protecting public health. The internal correspondence shows officials were willing to pressure private companies over what people could say, including speech extending well beyond the pandemic.
For an administration that spent so much time warning about threats to democracy, it certainly had an interesting approach to the First Amendment.
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“The Biden administration...”
And God only knows what that REALLY consisted of.
Probably a worldwide network.
Covid is harmless to the vast majority of people. Most who contract Covid don’t know they have it, or think it is simply a bad cold.
This was known as early as May of 2020.
This is a good window into just how deeply the left wants to control us, eventually at gunpoint.
I posted a story on masking from the New England Journal of Medicine and FB pulled it for “misinformation”. “Misinformation” is really just WrongThink.
I was tired for one day. Spent most of the day in bed. No cold. No fever. Nothing. Then it was gone. A co-worker, much younger, got it and went to the hospital and died. The treatment will kill you.
Look no further than the UK today................
“For an administration that spent so much time warning about threats to democracy, it certainly had an interesting approach to the First Amendment.”
It was never democracy. It was always “our democracy”. IOW, the leftist way, or no way.
Never got the jab and never got China flu as far as I could tell (never was sick at all). Then again, I haven’t ever had the flu to my knowledge.
I was one of those. My wife and I had it at the same time. I had a cold you ended up in the hospital where they continually tried to force remdesivir on her. After being told numerous times she didn’t want it they came in once when they thought she was sleeping and tried to inject it. She wasn’t and they didn’t. Later that day they abruptly called and said they were releasing her. Probably a few days too early. I guess if they couldn’t kill her the hospital they hoped she’d come home and die. She didn’t.
That’s why we need to go full Pinochet while we still can.
Had a bout of flu in Feb2020. Three days of ick. Small fever, soreness (unrelated to being an old fart), etc. Typical flu experience.
A sister article needs to be written on the activities in
FEDERAL, especially HHS, grants and contracts.
For example, Most Medicaid money is Federal with a smaller amount state money. The states often see that they have no choice but to parrot the federal line in order to get the money.
“IN BUREAUCRATS WE TRUST”. “IN SCIENTISTS WE TRUST” is the dominant theme. In the 1950s we adopted “IN GOD WE TRUST” because activities in Europe demonstrated that trust in science is not the same as trust in scientists. And bureaucrats and politicians were the least trustworthy.
The effort of the bureaucracy is constantly to replace “in GOG we trust” with “In Bureaucrats we trust”.
May 2020..
For Some here.
I was ‘hit’ November 2019.
Thanksgiving 2019 Was “C- Day”
.
This was “Net Neutrality” that was pushed about 15 years ago in Silicon Valley.
FB was going to be the gate keeper and CA the manager.
They were all set to turn it on until Hillary lost the election.
Dang
Real Auswhitz stuff there FRiend.
It was a nightmare.
Hospitals Were The Gas Chambers.
Where I live in the People’s Republic of Santa Cruz County, CA, that gets really ugly.
To me, it’s better to teach those morons that they’re the corporate tools.
Tell them how it works and show them the data.
Biden couldn’t plan a bowel movement.
Hospitals got what was essentially a bounty for every patient admitted "with COVID", every patient the administered Remdesivir to and every patient that went into ICU.
More likely the admin figured out she wasn't going to take the shot so they cut her loose to open the bed for the next potential bounty.
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