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Notes -
Project Veritas published another video that has gone on to have millions of views, but no media is willing to touch it - even Daily Mail deleted its article about it within hours.
I thought there'd be some coverage here, but apparently... ? It's a very CW event I believe.
Gist of it is, some affirmative action double minority hire (both gay and black) MD working for Pfizer under the lofty sounding but probably not that important position of "Pfizer Director, Research & Development Strategic Operations for mRNA scientific planning"
got slightlyy drunk with his Grindr date and said a good bunch of plausible seeming stuff, ranging from gosh, the revolving door between regulators and Pfizer is kinda unethical, but good for us to saying Pfizer is considering doing its own gain-of-function research to come up with better vaccines via either serial passage or something else. Give it a watch if you're interested, I think he wasn't making it up.
Then PV met up with him again, and showed him a tablet with the captured video. He said he had made all of that up to impress his date. (doubtful).
The second video is probably more interested for people who like "public freakouts" as the guy first acts like a bad gay stereotype, and later as a black one, at one point trying to destroy PV's tablet.
Interesting is that people like Majid Nawaaz were seen coming up with 12d chess theories about how this is an op to discredit Veritas and that the guy was a plant.
People have saved his Linked in before it got deleted and videos of him from schools he had attended according to his linked in, so if it's an op, it's an improbably good one.
EDIT: youtube took down the videos, still up on twitter.
1st vid: https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/1618420826986123265 (the date one)
2nd vid: https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/1618748408982040576 (confrontation in someone's restaurant and the freakout)
EDIT:
pfizer responds: https://www.pfizer.com/news/announcements/pfizer-responds-research-claims
They say they aren't doing serial passage / gain of function but are merely putting new spikes on the original virus in vitro, in an effort to see whether the vaccine still does something against new variants. I feel normies won't like this one bit.
They also say that they're doing "in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory".
So, it does seem like the guy is an idiot who talked about stuff they admit they were doing, of which he doesn't know enough about and which seems mostly reasonable, and then completely fucked up by adding in his own speculation about what they could do.
I'd say the video is most notable for seeing how absolutely blasé insiders can be about corruption and conflicts of interest. I guess if you have med school debts to pay off, chortling about how 'covid and covid vaccines are going to be great for the company' comes naturally ?
His admission that Pfizer is in bed with its regulators is important. That’s not something that people make up to brag about on dates, it’s actually the opposite. No one brags about their company being corrupt to a gay liberal on a date, neither would they say that they think Covid leaked from the Wuhan lab. This makes me strongly believe he wasn’t lying about his first claim, either.
I don’t know what Pfizer’s defense will be. “You don’t understand, our director of global research was a token diversity hire” is not something that can be transmitted on CNN.
Even if we were to interpret his remarks as “the idea came up in a meeting for fun but was shut down”, his statement on Pfizer being corrupt is super important!
Why not? The context would be "Yeah, I work for this big corporation in a lofty position, but I'm also aware of the problematic aspects of my job (like the revolving door etc.)". He's just trying to establish himself as something beyond just a company man.
The video doesn't really implicate this guy as doing something beyond repeating company gossip about things that have been talked about in the company (for instance, there's nothing to indicate that Pfizer is actually currently doing GoF; indeed, if they were doing it they wouldn't be discussing it in the potential sense of what they could be doing, though of course again if this is based on company gossip you could argue they might be doing it and all that has reached this guy are previous discussions on it). Furthermore, I'd guess the media would be suspicious of reporting on the basis of a video repeating all the hallmarks of Project Veritas video trickery, like cutting and pasting individual sentences in a way that's not too far off the classic Simpsons Homer-Simpson-sexual-harassment-babysitter episode, suddenly having O'Keefe explain the next sentence instead of playing that sentence etc.
But it’s not a progressive supposition that Pfizer is corrupt. So the admission does not score any points, compared to something like, “Pfizer needs to work on its diversity”. The more efficient way to establish his identity from his career would be to talk about things that are not his career.
It’s not gossip when you’re in the meeting. That’s now, I don’t know, eye witness testimony.
Any conservative documentary which uses editing to promote its message (to a populace with a short attention span) will be called trickery. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Binder full of women? The Covington martyrs? “Good people on both sides”? All the media does is trickery.
The "progressive love of Pfizer" is a frequently exaggerrated talking point among the Right. There have been columns criticizing Pfizer business practices in e.g. Jacobin, like this or this. They may not be the same criticisms as antivaxx right-wingers make, but they're there.
For instance, Pfizer lobbying to keep cheap offbrand vaccinations off the Third World markets is a frequent one I've heard (though not as frequent now since it's pretty evident the remaining third worlders aren't too eager to get vaccinated at all).
So what? People have listed other cases where Project Veritas videos have given a misleading impression of what has taken place in this thread.
Your linked articles do not criticize Pfizer for corruption with CDC/FDA, but for being capitalist and profit-motivated. I imagine Jacobin, wanting more government regulation, would not want to write a piece about the regulators being corrupt. My point is, again, that Progressives do not see these companies as being fundamentally corrupt — otherwise they would have to discount the CDC/FDA judgment on vaccine and entertain the “reasonable skepticism” of the opted out.
How so? While this specific article is about Pfizer, regulatory capture absolutely is nothing new to progressive discourse.
I'm not sure what "fundamentally corrupt" means here, but the Project Veritas video in question wouldn't seem to rely on any assumptions of "fundamental corruptness".
This is really weak sauce. It's a book review about a novel featuring cartoon capitalism that mostly misses the point of regulatory capture, and whose proposed solution is doubling-down on the exact stuff that enables regulatory capture.
Whether it's "weak sauce" was not the point. The point was whether progressives unanimously love Pfizer so much that the entire concept of the Project Veritas bust guy talking about corruption inside Pfizer to prove his neutrality to a potential date is self-evidently wrong.
Just today I saw this editorial by Bernie Sanders. Again, the criticism he makes might not be the one made by antivaxxers/right-wingers, but criticism it still is, and no-one could surely say that Bernie doesn't represent the general opinion of the modern American progressivism.
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