A new report shows Moderna is using former law enforcement, FBI and Secret Service analysts, and pharma-funded NGOs to control the COVID-19 vaccine debate.
Pharmaceutical giant Moderna is policing what it calls “vaccine misinformation” online through its disinformation department aimed at shutting down dissenting voices and anything that might undermine COVID-19-related policies, such as lockdowns, vaccine passports, and mass vaccination.
According to an exclusive report by investigative journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson published on Nov. 20 in UnHerd, Moderna isn’t just manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines; it has an entire team dedicated to monitoring a wide range of social media platforms, government agencies, and news websites in the name of addressing the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by identifying and “shutting down misinformation” that may negatively affect the vaccine debate.
The internal documents show a “sprawling effort to monitor basically everything said online, on social media, and in the news media about vaccine policy, COVID policy, about Moderna, and other vaccine companies,” Mr. Fang told The Hill.
Monitoring Team of Former FBI, Secret Service, and Pharma-Funded NGOs
Moderna’s monitoring team includes its Global Intelligence division, run by Nikki Rutman, who was involved in compiling internal company misinformation reports of “high-risk” celebrities critical of vaccine mandates, including unvaccinated tennis star Novak Djokovic, Elon Musk, and actor Russell Brand, according to the investigative report.
Before joining “Moderna’s corporate security team” in 2022, Ms. Rutman worked as an intelligence analyst in the U.S. intelligence community for nearly 19 years, most of which was spent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). According to the report, Ms. Rutman was working from the FBI’s Boston office during the COVID-19 pandemic and “Operation Warp Speed,” which involved weekly cybersecurity meetings with Moderna, also headquartered in Boston.
Before her role with the FBI, Ms. Rutman worked for the Director of National Intelligence as an “adviser on terrorism to a mission manager” and as a counterintelligence analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Ms. Rutman is only one of many former law enforcement agents working on Moderna’s monitoring team, along with a drug industry-funded NGO called the Public Good Projects (PGP) and Talkwalker, an artificial intelligence firm that uses its technology to monitor vaccine-related discussions across 150 million websites in nearly 200 countries.
