By Monica Showalter
What kind of dictator-wannabes are turning up at Davos these days?
It shouldn’t be surprising that one of them is European Union Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, a German bureaucrat with big ambitions for what you are to be allowed to read.
According to UnHerd:
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen today declared that “misinformation and disinformation” are greater threats to the global business community than war and climate change.
“For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate,” she said in her speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. “It is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarisation within our societies.”
The solution, according to von der Leyen, is for businesses and governments to collaborate to quash disinformation. “Many of the solutions lie not only in countries working together but, crucially, on businesses and governments, businesses and democracies working together,” she said. “While governments hold many of the levers to deal with the great challenges of our time, business have [sic] the innovation, the technology, the talents to deliver the solutions we need to fight threats like climate change or industrial-scale disinformation.”
She didn’t say what that disinformation she’s so upset about might be, but a good guess might just be in her history as a German bureaucrat, making secret phone calls with pharmaceutical companies and then lying about it when Germans filed the equivalent of Freedom of Information Act inquiries trying to find out just what she was up to.
According to her Wikipedia page, which cites sources:
In April 2021, The New York Times reported that von der Leyen had exchanged electronic correspondence with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla negotiating terms of sale of the COVID-19 vaccine to the EU.[169] Emily O’Reilly, the European Ombudsman, accused von der Leyen of “maladministration” for failure to disclose that correspondence upon a FOI request, and for claiming that the messages had disappeared, and for further claiming that the vaccine line item of the EU’s budget was confidential.[170][171]
von der Leyen took a personal role in negotiating the largest vaccine deal for the EU. If fully exercised, the deal is estimated to be worth around €35 billion and would cover the purchase of 900 million doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, with an additional 900 million doses available for purchase. Millions of COVID vaccines are currently unused and awaiting disposal in warehouses throughout the EU. Negotiators are trying to persuade Pfizer to make a compromise in order to halt or cancel some of those deliveries, with little success.[172]
So yeah, she’s been in bed with Big Pharma over the COVID vaccines for awhile, dishonestly hiding her role, which is very much in character given that Wikipedia also cited sources pointing out that she plagiarized her medical thesis and critics said she got away with it through political connections.
Naturally, she responds to European hesitancy towards inadequately tested vaccines in a very German way:
In December 2021 the former doctor expressed her concern that one-third of the European population still are not vaccinated. She said that “EU nations should open a debate around making COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory because too many people still refuse to get shots voluntarily.”[168]
Opening a debate, not on whether the vaccine is any good, which is what is driving the public’s vaccine “hesitancy,” but on how to force the questionable product onto unwilling people whether they like it or not. That’s what passes for ‘debate’ in her mind.
Should it surprise anyone that now she wants to control which information you are allowed to read?
Turns out there’s a recent report on RealClearInvestigations by Lee Fang about how Moderna, one of the Big Pharma COVID vaccine makers, had a big operation going about how to shut down Twitter tweets from various critics of their vaccine and their corporate profits. The claimed they were just shutting down “disinformation” but they were a flaming censorship operation of frankly questionable legality.
They got respected doctors such as Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya shadowbanned after he cited a study on COVID vaccines for kids that Moderna didn’t like. They also worked to censor the speech of major investigative journalists such as Alex Berenson and Michael Shellenberger, for reporting things that went against their “narrative.”
According to Fang’s report at RealClearInvestigations:
A series of internal company reports and communications reviewed by RealClearInvestigations show that Moderna has worked with former law enforcement and public health officials and a drug industry-funded non-governmental organization called The Public Good Projects (PGP) to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation.”
Part of this effort includes providing talking points to some 45,000 healthcare professionals “on how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream.” PGP and Moderna have created a new partnership, called the “Infodemic Training Program,” to prepare health care workers to respond to alleged vaccine-related misinformation.
The company has also used artificial intelligence to monitor millions of global online conversations to shape the contours of vaccine-related discussion. The internal files — shorthanded here as the Moderna Reports — show high-profile vaccine critics were closely monitored, particularly skeptics in independent media, including Michael Shellenberger, Russell Brand, and Alex Berenson. PGP, which was funded by a $1,275,000 donation from the Biotechnology and Innovation Organization, a lobby group representing Pfizer and Moderna, has identified alleged vaccine misinformation and helped facilitate the removal of content from Twitter, among other social media platforms, throughout 2021 and 2022.
They also “flagged” Robert Kennedy, Jr., successfully getting Twitter’s gnomes to do their dirty work to silence him. They “flagged” former Fox News host Megan Kelly after she tweeted that she regretted getting her COVID boosters. The gamy details of that report are hideous examples of violations of the First Amendment and corporate malfeasance.
As for this von der Leyen speech being delivered on the floor of the World Economic Forum WEF), it’s fairly ominous as it suggests a political-corporatist machine turning to shut down free speech globally with Ursula the Davos Witch the perfect instrument for this mission.
As Olivia Murray noted from her January 15 blog on the WEF, they have claimed that “disinformation” is their primary concern, even moreso than global warming, which is their usual default position.
According to von der Leyen’s Wikipedia page, von der Leyen has been a member of the Board of Trustes of the World Economic Forum since 2016. She wasn’t just some wild character at the Davos forum talking out of turn.
She in fact was highly involved in a lot of this corporate-state conniving with Big Pharma in the past in some of her previous bureaucratic work.
But whether it’s global warming or ‘disinformation’ or whatever beauty-queen world-peace cause they claim to champion this year, the aim is anything but beautiful. In fact it’s exactly the same no matter what they pick — to separate free people from their rights and power — whether it is in forcing them to eat bugs, which was big at their conference about a year ago, or in depriving them of their rights to free speech. They want power for themselves by taking power from you, and they’ll latch onto any issue they can think of to get it.