"16 Most Prolific Censors" An excerpt from the 2024 Revision of "Heroes and Villains: The COVID-19 Book of Lists"

I'm sending it to the publisher on Sunday!

I’m thinking about changing the title to “Heroes and Villains of COVID-19” because someone told me it would sell better with a shorter title. Please vote in the comments! or what about a play on “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”? Please vote!

13. Andy Slavitt (Senior Advisor to the COVID-19 Response Coordinator)

 Mr. Slavitt went to Wharton and Harvard Business School. His first job was as an investment banker. In 2003, he sold a company he started, called Health Allies, to the HMO, United Health Group. He became CEO of Optum/Insight and the group executive vice president for Optum, both subsidiaries of United Health.

Five years later, in February of 2008, Optum, then named Ingenix, was investigated by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo due to “a scheme by health insurers to defraud consumers by manipulating reimbursement rates." Less than one year into the investigation, on January 13, 2009, Ingenix announced an agreement with the New York State attorney settling the probe into the independence of the health pricing database. United Health Group and Ingenix would pay $50 million. On January 15, 2009, only two days later, United Health Group announced a $350 million settlement of three class action lawsuits filed in federal court by the American Medical Association, United Health Group members, healthcare providers, and state medical societies for not paying out-of-network benefits. He’s a businessman, an executive in an HMO, a completely superfluous layer of profit takers situated between doctors and their patients, adding significantly to the cost of medical care. I can tell you from experience that these places make a lot of their money by collecting premiums and denying coverage. They do this by refusing to approve medically-indicated procedures and by denying payments to doctors after the procedure has been performed.

This actually happened to me in my first job. I was the only surgeon in a small town in Mississippi. All of the hospital employees used me as their surgeon. I was a novice at filing insurance claims and they kept sending them back because of trivial omissions, like leaving out the middle initial in an insured’s name and saying, We cannot find this person in our list of insured’s”. This went on for a year. After a year went by, the insurance company then said they didn’t have to pay because the claims were now past the time limit for submitting. They dragged their feet in notifying me that I had to re-submit my claims, sometimes by as much as three or four months.  When I wrote them a letter, asking for the reason why the payments hadn’t arrived, I heard once again that there was something wrong with the form I had sent in. From the point when they said my submission was too late, letters came that said, “Please refer to Ms. “So and So” for remittance.” I wasn’t about to bill the people who scrubbed the floors so I could walk around in my white coat all day.  I think it was about 10 cases I didn’t get paid for.

Mr. Slavitt wouldn’t have even a freshman level understanding of what would constitute false and misleading information as it pertains to a pandemic caused by a coronavirus transmitted by aerosols, nor would he understand how the human immune system works and why the vaccines were unable to block transmission. He certainly would not understand how the vaccines worked or even the risks associated with their use. This probably was of no concern to President Biden who assigned him to the role of “Senior Advisor to the COVID-19 Response Coordinator”. It was probably more valuable to the Narrative that the companies he ran and helped run got into trouble with the New York State Attorney General after only five years of his tenure there. The last thing Biden wanted, was a very knowledgeable medical doctor who would be unwilling to remove any information from social media that could benefit patients.

Mr. Slavitt worked with social media to try to get them to take down posts containing “false and misleading information” on COVID-19.  Mr. Slavitt, Mr. Flaherty, who double majored in TVR and politics at Ithaca College, (i.e. no medical knowledge), and lawyer Dana Remus (no medical knowledge) were working with social media companies who also did not have any medical knowledge. Their mission was to take down false and misleading information on COVID-19 without either group actually knowing what was false and misleading. People died because of this.

A little research into “fact checkers”, in general, revealed that these companies rarely had employees doing the fact checking who had a background in any science, let alone medicine, and in all the companies I checked, there was not a single medical doctor; not that being a doctor makes one immune to spreading false and misleading information; just listen to Drs. Jha, Fauci, Walensky, Collins, Birx, Wen, Reiner, Hotez, Topol, Redfield, Z-Dogg, Offit, Monica Gandhi, Sanjay Gupta, etc.  My posts, which contained no false and misleading information, were regularly taken down while I watched doctors like the one pictured above, Dr. Mike Hansen, get very critical characteristics of the virus very wrong at times, dangerously misleading the public. For example, his claim that the virus is transmitted primarily through respiratory droplets makes people confident that they can shop a grocery aisle 20 minutes after someone has lingered there because respiratory droplets fall to the ground rapidly. But those people should not be confident at all. Aerosols linger for hours or even days in stagnant, indoor air.

Another case of Sheftall’s razor? I don’t think so in this case. Dr. Hansen’s problem is that his progressive political ideology keeps him from analyzing medical evidence objectively.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though. The false information most doctors have been spreading since January of 2020 has only partially been due to lack of knowledge and understanding. They’ve also been motivated by money, power, fame, and, like Dr. Hansen, political ideology, to varying degrees, to lie- not Dr. Hansen- about the medical science, knowing that the fear they instilled in the public would make them more likely to agree to ill-conceived policies like lockdowns and more likely to agree to taking an injection that had never been used in humans and about which the long-term side effects were completely unknown.

14. Rob Flaherty(Deputy Assistant to the President)

See above under Andy Slavitt

15. Dana Remus (White House Lawyer)

See above under Andy Slavitt

16. Renee DiResta

Ms. DiResta’s position at the end of this list is not due to her relative unimportance compared to those listed above. In fact, as one of the few true leaders of the US government-sponsored Censorship Industrial Complex, you could make a case that she should be listed at the top. She is not only involved in censoring journalists, scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens, she is involved in an effort to plant disinformation. While her activities as research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory cover censorship in all categories (not just that related to COVID-19) I will leave you with the link to a thorough look by the outstanding journalist, Michael Shellenberger, at Ms. DiResta’s activities, from working at the CIA in a fellowship program during college to her work at the SIO today. He exposes her work at New Knowledge, a political consulting firm that planted fake Russian accounts to follow Roy Moore in the special election held to fill an Alabama senate seat between Moore, a Republican and Doug Jones, a Democrat. The Russian accounts would follow Moore to make their planted story seem more plausible that the Kremlin preferred he win the election. New Knowledge also planted news stories along these lines. It worked. Jones defeated Moore and took the seat. Later, a memo circulated by New Knowledge stated that the fake Russian accounts and the planted news stories shifted enough votes from Moore to Jones to flip the election in Jones’s favor. Two weeks later Renee DiResta became the organization’s Research Director. She’s up to her neck in the growing, taxpayer-funded, US government effort to decide what information the public is allowed to see.  Shellenberger’s story is well worth reading from start to finish: zerohedge.com/political/shellenberger-why-renee-diresta-leads-

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