Who says the FBI and its allied wokester government agencies were the only ones using Twitter as a proxy censor to shut down American political discussion?

Turns out that the White House had its snoot in that trough, too, particularly on the matter of COVID-19 information.

That's what independent journalist David Zweig found in his examination of the Twitter Files, in its COVID-19 edition.

According to the Washington Examiner:

The White House pressured Twitter to suppress tweets that included "misinformation" about the COVID-19 pandemic, even when Twitter users shared information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the latest string of bombshells from the Twitter Files, the current White House "rigged the COVID debate" by censoring information that was "inconvenient to government policy," discrediting doctors and experts who disagreed with the administration's narrative, and by suppressing ordinary users, including those who shared data from the CDC, journalist David Zweig tweeted Monday.

1. THREAD:

THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Kevin Downey, Jr. at PJMedia has a good summary of the tweet readings here.

The short story here is that the White House, first under President Trump, then under Joe Biden, both pressured Twitter to shut down COVID "misinformation," the Trump administration with the more admirable aim of preventing panic-buying of supplies, the less admirable Biden administration to prevent actual information about vaccines from getting out to the public, while promoting lunacies such as permanent mask-wearing, particularly among children; the virtues of extended lockdowns; vaccine mandates; and suppression of news of natural immunity, which is standard medical knowledge.

They shut down the accounts of distinguished doctors.  They shut down the accounts of little-guy doctors reporting what they saw in the field.  They really couldn't stand former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who reported on the dangers of the vaccines.  They went after a doctor who suggested that the COVID-19 vaccine be used primarily for the elderly and the medically vulnerable.  They went after the top doctors who created the Great Barrington Declaration warning of the danger of lockdowns.

The report doesn't get into it, but we can also surmise that they went after medical practitioners who could see through their own "lived experience" that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were helping their patients avoid a stretch on the ventilator in the hospital or else simply get better.  We saw a lot of those shut down during that era of madness.

Even those who used the CDC's own data got shut down.

The censors themselves had problems with not being able to tell good medical information from bad medical information, so they pretty much just shut everyone down.  Who were these censors?  Third-world contractors from places people are desperate to emigrate away from, with low medical knowledge — the Philippines was the nation named, but the report suggested there were many such places.  Imagine a fourth-world computer nerd in a fourth-world country, desperate to emigrate to America for all that "free" and advanced health care — censoring the top doctors here in the States.  What an ugly picture.

But now we know why the simplest and most basic of medical understanding, such as the importance of natural immunity, and the crazed reaction against those who opposed getting jabbed by the new and experimental vaccine, was so repressed — on Twitter, on the news, and among the Washington elites.

Twitter shut down medical debate and ultimately created terrible situations where lockdowns were extended; children were stunted in their social growth as they were masked up if not kept out of schools; and people declined their time-sensitive cancer treatments and other medical testings and screenings, only to find that whatever illnesses they had had advanced.  That's a crime against humanity, really.

Joe Biden was all in for it, still yawping about what a good COVID-19 manager he is — as the death toll under his administration exceeded the 600,000-plus death toll under President Trump's administration, which he loudly condemned as unacceptable.

Maybe if he had allowed the free flow of information, from the top thinkers in the field, instead of groveled to the diktats of bureaucratic mediocrities like Dr. Anthony Fauci, his own record would not have been so abysmal.  But Biden doesn't care about that.  All he cares about is censoring dissidents and creating, as Instapundit's Ed Driscoll notes,  "'everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State,' to coin a phrase."

Now we know.

Image: Twitter screen shot.