Congress Had Questions About the CDC Stifling Dissent. Rochelle Walensky Refused To Answer. Robby Soave
https://reason.com/2023/06/15/rochelle-walensky-cdc-congress-questions-covid-meta-censorship/
Rochelle Walensky, the outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), faced tough questioning from House Republicans on Tuesday, when she appeared before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.) grilled Walensky about the CDC’s communications with social media companies—Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in particular—during her tenure as the head of the federal agency chiefly responsible for battling COVID-19.
As reported in Reason‘s March 2023 issue, Walensky’s CDC routinely communicated with content moderators and Facebook, recommending aggressive takedowns of purported misinformation about mitigation efforts, COVID-19’s origins, and vaccines:
According to a trove of confidential documents obtained by Reason, health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook as well. They were consulted frequently, at times daily. They were actively involved in the affairs of content moderators, providing constant and ever-evolving guidance. They requested frequent updates about which topics were trending on the platforms, and they recommended what kinds of content should be deemed false or misleading. “Here are two issues we are seeing a great deal of misinfo on that we wanted to flag for you all,” reads one note from a CDC official. Another email with sample Facebook posts attached begins: “BOLO for a small but growing area of misinfo.”
These Facebook Files show that the platform responded with incredible deference. Facebook routinely asked the government to vet specific claims, including whether the virus was “man-made” rather than zoonotic in origin. (The CDC responded that a man-made origin was “technically possible” but “extremely unlikely.”) In other emails, Facebook asked: “For each of the following claims, which we’ve recently identified on the platform, can you please tell us if: the claim is false; and, if believed, could this claim contribute to vaccine refusals?”
Comer’s questions got straight to the heart of this matter. Unfortunately, Walensky declined to directly comment on it.
Walensky’s defense for not answering was that the CDC is party to pending litigation involving the suppression of speech on social media; the state of Missouri has sued the federal government over its role in pressuring social media companies to stifle COVID-19 dissent. The downside of the lawsuit, unfortunately, is that it provided Walensky a pretext for keeping quiet when questioned by Congress.
Walensky also fielded questions about the teachers unions’ role in keeping schools closed during the pandemic, and this time, she answered. The former CDC director confirmed that the American Federation of Teachers fought to establish a policy that would automatically close schools that surpassed certain COVID-19 thresholds—and that the CDC rejected this policy.
On this matter, Walensky’s testimony provides an even stronger case that if the teachers unions had had greater control over pandemic policy, schools would have stayed closed for longer.
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