The Highwire with Del Bigtree - FDA’s CALIFF CALLS FOR MORE CENSORSHIP

Episode Date: May 7, 2023

After uncovering a censorship industrial complex that infected the entire social media substrate during Covid, US FDA commissioner Dr. Robert Califf is now saying we need more control over speech. But, in the era of Elon’s Twitter, will his message take hold?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Let's stay on this idea of the Constitution and the First Amendment. So outside of religion, there's another thing in that First Amendment, which was freedom of speech. And the people in America right now are at an inflection point, a crossroads, with that point, that direct point. Their speech, their open debate has been whittled away, has been chipped away at and outright censored over the last three years in ways that we've never seen before, particularly in the area of health. And that is while we've had the hardest mandated medicine push the world has ever seen. And this whittling away of free speech, there's been an open purpose of the people doing that to change people's thinking and behaviors. Now, we have to have an open debate about this. And let's start with the commissioner of the FDA right now, Robert Caliph.

So he was a paid consultant, a longtime paid consultant with Merck, J&J, GlaxoSmith, Eli Lilly. He was also a lead strategy and policy advisor for Alphabet's health subsidiaries. Now, Alphabet's a holding company. They have Google in there, a lot of Google companies as well. But he was a full-time head of strategy and policy for Google's life science and health divisions. So we have in Caliph, he's only been there for just over a year now at the FDA as this position. We have a curious new hybrid. We have a three-way revolving door with big tech, big pharma, and big government.

And he has something to say about this debate around health. Take a listen. All right. One thing I learned in my work at Alphabet, which I did between my two FDA stents, Google would be the company people recognized within the Alphabet family. You know, people come to the clinician. They have a very limited amount of time. There's a little bit of discussion.

Then they leave. They're immediately inundated with information they're getting on the Internet. If you're not thinking about that, talking with your patients about it, asking them where they're getting their information, you're really missing the 95% of the time they're getting other information compared to the 1% of time that they're spending with you as a clinician. How did your experience working in the tech industry, working at Alphabet, impact how you think about the role of the tech industry in helping try to stop some of this misinformation

or disinformation? I think there is a real need for better regulation of how we deal with this complex information. You know, if our health was better than anyone else's in the world, I'd say, okay, we'll just work this out over time. But our life expectancy is going in the wrong direction and we need to think hard about what we can do about it. I mean, I'd have to say it's the same argument I make because you're killing us. The FDA, the CDC, is poisoning us on a constant basis. is amazing that he thinks that those that are trying to resist that are or what's causing the health problems. Exactly. And so there's further conversation during that interview. This is one of the

headlines that came out of that interview. FDA commissioner calls for crackdown on health misinformation claims it reduces life expectancy. He says in this article in that interview, why aren't we using medical products as efficiently or effectively as our peer countries, Caliph said? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influence their thinking. Well, let me just hold on to that point for a second and go to that. Only the United States and New Zealand allow direct consumer marketing. So where is that in the conversation? And then let's talk about how much pharmaceutical companies spend worldwide.

I have a chart here I want to show you. The United States makes up roughly 41% of total pharmaceutical spending worldwide. China comes in second with a market share of nearly. nearly 12%. But understand, China has 1.4 billion people roughly. United States has just under 332 million. So you can see the offset there of the spending. And so I don't know what he's talking about that. We're not using the pharmaceutical products enough or we're not taking them enough

or people are getting their information in strange ways. The United States is over farmed. I mean, this would be the exemplary country if there was ever one on the globe. So let's just look back. saves. We should be the healthiest people in the world. We are drugged more than anyone else in the world using far more drugs on every single level there is. As you said, direct to consumer marketing. And amazing when he talks about social media, social media is not where you're getting inundated. I look at Facebook. I don't see this on Twitter. But on my television, every freaking commercial break and every sitcom is talking about how we're on drugs and need more drugs to survive. It's total insanity. It's killing us. And we have just been through the hardest influence push, censorship push around the health conversation. So what he's talking about we need more of, we just had the biggest one in the world. And really the history of the world when it comes to the digital aspect of this.

And let's just go through what we had. Now, he's calling for a double down on this because I guess it didn't work. But let's look at this. Let's look at the CDC. The CDC provided 156 million in funding. Here's a little infographic. And this is a fiscal year of 2020. to 500 plus other partners at the national state and local levels. So you can see that this influence

here. And this is all funding for partners specifically for increasing vaccine confidence and uptake. So this is what we're looking at. You can see there that little red box is the CDC foundation. Interestingly enough, that's a nonprofit organization that was that was created by Congress as a go-between. So instead of the CDC directly interacting with big pharma or big tech, which it wouldn't be that good with the integrity piece, they have this. CDC foundation, this nonprofit, that's a go-between. So this nonprofit can interact directly with any corporations it wants, any NGOs, and do this type of work. So that's interesting. But then we have studies upon studies of hired out third parties saying, well, if we were to censor, how would we go about

doing that? What would that look like? We have Stanford's Verality Project. Now, this was a pilot program. Here's one of the headlines that came out of this. Latest Twitter files tackle great COVID-19 lie machine flagging true content as disinformation. This virality project was a seven-month project from Stanford University to monitor anti-vaccine narratives, as they call it, online. And what happened was journalist Matt Taiibi. He gained access to the Twitter files. These are the internal files, the emails that were going back and forth before Elon Musk's take over. And he found some curious things.

This is what he reports. reports of vaccinated individuals contracting COVID-19 anyway, natural immunity, suggesting COVID-19 leak from a lab, or even worrisome jokes. All were characterized as potential violations, he writes, or disinformation events by the virality project, a sweeping cross-platform effort to monitor billions of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies,

and a slew of often state-funded NGOs. But here, Del is the golden nugget. Virality project, he writes, emails were found in the Twitter files describing stories of true vaccine side effects as an actionable content. It says true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy. That's the bullet point. Underneath that, it says viral posts of individuals experiencing vaccine hesitancy or stories of true vaccine side effects. This content is not clearly mis or disinformation, but it may contain malinformation, exaggerated or misleading, also included in this bucket are often true posts,

which could fuel vaccine hesitancy. I hate making this comparison, but I have to. And this is what happens when you have Nazi Germany, and some journalist wants to say, look, there's these concentration camps, and though it's true, it's going to create hesitancy towards our job to try and clean the bloodline of our nation.

I mean, this is how scary this is. They're saying these are true. These are real vaccine injury stories, but people should not be allowed to tell their stories to each other, or they might just start causing hesitancy. This is really, really scary stuff. off. Right. And you know, this project when they talk about it, it's not some neutral project. Let's just going with an open mind. Let's see what's going on here. Clearly from those data points,

this is a very targeted, actionable events that are targeting true stories. And we've talked, I mean, we've interviewed so many parents that have said they've been censored for just telling their story about how their child was harmed by a vaccine or how, you know, an adult, how they were harmed by a vaccine, no longer. And we've seen Facebook take. those stories off. We knew this was happening, but now we have it in black and white. So the Routy project's over. That was just a fun little experiment. But now what appears to be replacing it is something a little more permanent. This is the Mercury Project. And here's a press release from the Mercury Project. Mercury Project to boost COVID-19 vaccine rates and counter public health

miss and disinformation in 17 countries worldwide. So they're researching. This is a research initiative on how this miss and disinformation that they call it spread and also how to combat it. So let's look at the research framework here. Again, all this is not enough for Dr. Caliph. We need more of this. I mean, what I want to point out here is I think the one thing I will agree is I think they named it properly as being, you know, one of the most toxic substances on Earth in Mercury. It's exactly the toxicity with which this type of government intervention will be upon our constitutional rights. I mean, it's really, really far fine, but go on, yeah. Yeah, so what we look into there, we'll dig into their research framework. This was published on their website on

March of 2023. And it says here, I mean, right off the bat, first line, vaccination is an action with clear health benefits. Well, if you're not, if you're not on board with that, Dell, you're clearly going to be a target for this research initiative. And it goes on to say, but individuals may face a variety of barriers to realizing those benefits, including the direct and opportunity costs required to search for accurate vaccine information. They call those, quote, search costs. And then in others, to assess the accuracy of multiple forms of vaccine information, they call those decision costs, and to acquire the actual vaccination itself, which is the logistical cost. But, you know, so, okay, we have search costs. So in that, they wrap that in.

That takes cognitive efforts. Oh, that's tough. And then in their decision costs, and when people are deciding, they said, well, one way we can help them to decide is to flag content that is misinformation. Well, they've been doing that for three years. And it actually had, you know, I can save them. a lot of money here. That has the opposite effect of what you're trying to do. And if you're talking about cognitive effort, shouldn't you be investing in the cognition of the people to make their own decisions, to develop their own intuition about what to do with their own bodies? That seems like

that would be better for Americans and be a better investment than just labeling some things, misinformation. So let's look at whose funding, because it always goes back to who's funding these projects. Where's the money coming from? So here's the snapshot on their own website. We have, Oh boy. Don't say it. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There we are. Rockefeller Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, which is interesting because that is funded each fiscal year by Congress. So now you have direct government, U.S. government involvement in this initiative, which, you know, is very, very interesting and worrisome and problematic. And so we're at a space here where we have literally

tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of, you know, we'll call them now. citizen journalists. These are just normal people sharing accurate information. And we have this, this censorship industrial complex, as it's been called by Taiibi and Michael Schellenberger, that's coming down and saying, you know, one of the tip of the spirits is Robert Calliff saying, we need more of this. We need more censorship. And this is the battle right now. So it's the humans really versed the algorithms on this digital space. And right now, the message is getting out. we have this moment of breath where we're winning, where we're really showing people what truth is. Yeah, I mean, and that's the problem they talk about, right?

I mean, they are looking, they've got the sites on us, is why we are investing a lot in our infrastructure and technology here at the high wires, so that we'll always be able to broadcast to you. But while you're going to work, you know, all week, we are trying to figure out how they're going to try and stop us from being able to communicate with you. This is getting serious, folks. It's really happening. when you see these politicians and we watch someone like Caliph who is now, he literally in a human body represents this horrific merger between, you know, medicine and AI and technologies.

Very, very dangerous and scary things ahead. If we don't, you know, take back control of the system and get people that actually believe in our Constitution, our rights to freedom to be running this country. Yeah, it's crazy.