The latest installment in the chronicles of federal government censorship efforts comes from Phillip W. Magness, Ryan M. Yonk and James Harrigan, scholars with the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in “Biden’s State Department Paid NewsGuard to Tar Organizations Like Ours.”
In October 2020, AIER hosted the conference that produced the Great Barrington Declaration, the first major scientific challenge to draconian lockdown policies of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984 and a government bureaucrat since 1968. The GBD, headed by medical scientists from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, gained widespread traction. As the AIER scholars explain, that “provoked the wrath of the federal government.”
National Institutes of Health boss Francis Collins tasked Fauci to wage a “quick and devastating published take down” of the GBD scientists. The government attack on the GBD also placed AIER in the crosshairs of NewsGuard, which claims to provide “transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies.”
Representing itself as unbiased, NewsGuard launched a “fact check” of the AIER website conducted by a reviewer with “few professional qualifications in either science or health policy.” Websites promoting “unfounded conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins” were branded “misinformation.” This brand of censorship is now the subject of lawsuit filed in federal court. Read the AIER scholars’ full article here.
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