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The Meta leadership knew about the negative effects of the anti-Covid vaccines and concealed the truth, conspiracy theorists claim.
NEWS: “In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg advised his employees against taking the COVID-19 vaccine. Yesterday, he openly admitted that he regrets cooperating with the Biden-Harris administration in censoring information on the Internet about COVID-19 and the pandemic”.
NARRATIVES: 1. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg knew about the harmful effects of anti-Covid vaccines as early as 2021 and warned his employees about them. 2. Facebook admitted that it censored the truth about anti-Covid vaccines and the Covid-19 pandemic, under pressure from the American authorities.
Statements taken out of context
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: An apparently “leaked” video from inside Meta, the parent company of the social media platform Facebook, depicting CEO Mark Zuckerberg warning his employees about the potential risks of the Covid vaccine, has resurfaced these days, promoted by conspiracy propaganda. In the 25-second video, Zuckerberg expresses concern about altering human DNA and RNA, but makes absolutely no reference to mRNA vaccines: “I share some caution on this, because we just don't know the long-term side effects of basically modifying people's DNA and RNA to directly encode in a person's DNA and RNA basically the ability to produce those antibodies, and whether that causes other mutations or other risks downstream”.
The recording was originally shared on X in February 2021 by Project Veritas, an American far-right group that has over the years produced several manipulative edited videos promoting conspiracy theories, claiming to be secret recordings. Project Veritas aimed to discredit the mass media and several “progressive” organizations by spreading fake news and disinformation. Project Veritas' modus operandi has been a constant source of legal trouble for the group, which has faced several defamation lawsuits filed by people featured in its videos, resulting substantial damages paid to the victims.
The video resurfaced in February 2023, claiming to have been recorded in August 2021, which is obviously false, despite the timestamp suggested in the video display. In fact, the video was a recording of an internal meeting of Meta from the summer of 2020, consisting of a series of questions and answers for Facebook employees during the first weeks of the pandemic. At the time, Covid-19 vaccines were at least half a year away from becoming available to the public. Furthermore, the excerpt in question is taken out of context, describing Mark Zuckerberg admitting his lack of adequate understanding of how mRNA vaccines work, because, like the majority of the population, he had only just learned of their existence. A transcript of Zuckerberg's full response was published by Snopes, a fact-checking website. This transcript revealed the context that is missing from the original leaked video. At the very start of his speech on this topic, the head of Facebook said that “There is some good news – there was a positive announcement by Moderna about their – you know, their first round of trials this week. It was a safety trial for 45 people. No one has any bad side effects yet. But I have to say, there are a couple of different paths to a vaccine here. There's sort of the traditional path, where you modify a virus to make it a little less – to make it harmless, or at least less harmful, and then inject it in, and then have the body develop antibodies to fight it. There's a new approach that people are trying, which is called an RNA vaccine, which is what this Moderna vaccine is basically attempting to do, which is just basically injecting RNA directly into a person to turn a person's own cells directly into a factory for producing antibodies by basically appending the genetic code to create antibodies into your own genome rather than just kind of exposing your body to the virus and have it fight and develop an immune response on its own, and... I think that if this is possible and safe, then I think it would be a huge breakthrough, and it would be a great path going forward for more rapidly developing, basically, vaccines for a whole lot of other viruses that come in the future ...”
The introduction is followed by the fragment incriminated by conspiracy theorists, and Zuckerberg's speech ends with the following words: “Certainly, the initial Moderna results are good. But I also wouldn't get over-hyped by that. I think we're still unlikely to have a vaccine sometime before the middle of next year. But certainly, I don't think we've gotten any particularly bad news yet that would suggest that it has to take longer than we thought in the past”. It is clear as day that Zuckerberg never made any warning about the vaccine, and even expressed his impatience, to a certain degree, about its development. Later, in December 2020, he told his employees that he would not require them to take the anti-Covid jab in order to return to office. At the same time, however, he said he supported vaccination and offered to help stop the pandemic and promote vaccination.
In fact, the reemergence of this video is closely tied to the letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to the Republican Congressman Jim Jordan a few days ago, criticizing the pressure the Facebook platform was been under from the Democratic administration, which called on the social media platform to censor information related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Zuckerberg's approach was quickly exploited by conspiracy propaganda, which thus claimed that the truth about the pandemic and anti-Covid vaccines was strongly distorted.
Despite the fact that the Meta CEO’s letter acknowledges that the Biden administration pressured the company “to censor certain content related to Covid-19, including humor and satire”, it does not say that Facebook actually complied. “I think the government pressure was wrong, and I regret not being more honest about it”, Zuckerberg wrote, without saying he would in any way censor views that don’t align with official narratives. Besides, hundreds of thousands of conspiratorial posts are still visible both on Facebook and on other social networks, without being restricted. In fact, the news is not even new. It is already well-known that the American authorities put pressure not only on Meta, but also on other companies in the field of technology, in an attempt to rein in misinformation related to the Covid throughout the pandemic. This pressure was even the subject of a recent US Supreme Court trial in which the panel ruled in favor of the Biden administration.
Medicine for imaginary diseases
BACKGROUND: False narratives regarding the effectiveness and effects of vaccination have been circulating in Romania for many years, but they became much more visible with the development of anti-Covid vaccines. One of them is Russia, which seeks to destabilize Western societies. At the same time, however, there are a lot of Western publications and “influencers”, usually from the area of the radical right and conspiracists, who are also sources of disinformation. These are taken over and spread by other “influencers” or local publications, to an audience sensitive to such narratives and disinformation – coronasceptics, anti-vaxxers, people who mistrust the authorities, etc. Genuine anti-vaccine movements have emerged in numerous countries, heavily influenced by some of these narratives, which they take up, internalize, and amplify.
In Romania, several publications have taken over such false narratives and sought, over time, to validate their anti-vaccine theories through pseudo-experts, anonymous websites or by misquoting various studies. Veridica has already dismantled several fake news and disinformation narratives regarding the anti-Covid vaccines, which allegedly cause sterility across three generations and mental illnesses, reduce life expectancy in men by 24 years, or cause physical disabilities, testicular cancer and myocarditis in people who take the jab, leading to their death.
Basically, the narrative aligns itself with those individuals who claim there is a secretive, global plan designed to depopulate the planet and/or control it entirely. According to conspiracy theorists, the plan to manipulate humanity would be put into practice with the help of new technologies based on artificial intelligence, but also some medical procedures that, in the hands of the World Health Organization, are used as biological weapons. They draw attention to an occult plan which, from now on, seeks to keep humanity in a constant struggle with invented pandemics which, on the one hand, will kill most people, and on the other hand, will suppress the individual rights and liberties of those left alive.
Adrian Cacovean, a surgeon who later respecialized as a homeopathic therapist, is a well-established Romanian conspiracy theorist and a strong opponent of vaccination and allopathic medicine in general, who claims there are no viruses, and that the Covid pandemic was just a fabrication of the world occult. However, in March 2020, shortly after the pandemic broke out in Romania, Cacovean sold an alleged medicine against the coronavirus, a move that led the authorities to open a criminal investigation for fraud.
PURPOSE: To erode the population's trust in the authorities, to promote anti-vaccine, sovereigntist and anti-Western rhetoric, to validate self-promoted conspiracy theories, to stir and amplify social unrest.
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