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Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., challenged ex-Twitter official Vijaya Gadde during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee, demanding to know what medical expertise she had before censoring COVID-19 vaccine information from Harvard and Stanford educated doctors as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"The Twitter Files were not just about Hunter Biden’s laptop," Mace said Wednesday. "The Twitter Files make it apparent Twitter worked overtime to suppress accurate COVID information."
The congresswoman noted that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, had tweeted an article he wrote on natural immunity, but that tweet was marked as a "trends blacklist."
"Apparently, the views of a Stanford doctor are disinformation to you people," Mace said.
Vijaya Gadde, former chief legal officer of Twitter, testifies during a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing on Capitol Hill, Feb. 8, 2023. (AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster)
Mace also noted how the Twitter Files released by the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, exposed how Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard-educated epidemiologist, once tweeted, "COVID vaccines are important for high-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it nor children."
The Twitter Files showed that his tweet was deemed false information because it ran contrary to the CDC.
"Where did you go to medical school?" Mace asked Gadde, the former chief legal officer of Twitter.
Gadde and three other former Twitter executives testified before the hearing on Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post's reporting on President Joe Biden's family’s business dealings ahead of the 2020 election, based on information obtained from the abandoned laptop of Biden's son, Hunter Biden.
"I did not go to medical school," Gadde said.
"I’m sorry?" Mace asked. Gadde repeated, "I did not go to medical school."
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., grilled former Twitter official Vijaya Gadde on the censorship of COVID information before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. (AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite)
"That’s what I thought. Why do you or anyone else at Twitter think that you had the medical expertise to censor a doctor’s expert opinion?" Mace asked.
Gadde began, "Our policies regarding COVID were designed to protest individuals …"
"You guys censored Harvard-educated doctors, Stanford-educated doctors, doctors that are educated in the best places in the world, and you silenced those voices," Mace interjected.
"I along with many Americans have long-term effects of COVID. Not only was I a long-hauler, but I have effects from the vaccine. It wasn’t the first shot. But it was the second shot that I now developed asthma that has never gone away since I had the second shot. I have tremors in my left hand," Mace explained earlier before beginning her line of questioning. "And I have the occasional heart pain that no doctor can explain, and I’ve had a battery of tests. I find it extremely alarming Twitter’s unfettered censorship spread into medical fields and affected millions of Americans by suppressing expert opinions from doctors and censoring those who disagree with the CDC. I have great [regrets] about getting the shot because of the health issues that I now have that I don’t think are ever going to go away. And I know that I am not the only American who has those kinds of concerns."
Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, speaks during a Feb. 8, 2023, hearing on the Hunter Biden laptop. (Anna Rose Layden / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Mace displayed another tweet from an individual with 18,000 followers. That person shared a screenshot of a chart with CDC data, meaning "it should be accurate," according to Twitter’s standards, the congresswoman said. But Twitter still labeled the tweet as misleading.
"You’re not a doctor, right Ms. Gadde? What makes you or anyone else at Twitter think you have the medical expertise to censor actual, accurate CDC data?" Mace asked again.
"It is the government’s own data. It’s ridiculous that we’re even needing to have this conservation today. It’s not just about the laptop. This is about medical advice that expert doctors were trying to give Americans because social media companies like Twitter were silencing their voices," she said.
Gadde said Twitter received legal demands to remove content from the platform from the U.S. government and governments around the world and those are published on a third-party website.
"Thank God for [journalist] Matt Taibbi. Thank God for Elon Musk for allowing to show us and the world that Twitter was basically a subsidiary of the FBI, censoring real medical voices with real expertise that put real Americans’ lives in danger because they didn’t have that information," Mace added.
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