Pfizer Does Not Own Orgenesis: So Why Does This Misinformation Trend on X?

Is it because the X algorithm in fact serves to do the exact opposite of what is claimed?

In a recent viral tweet, Robert Malone wrote the following:

A first problem with the tweet is that it is a word-for-word rehash of a year-old tweet from the X-user who goes by the name “Pelham”. (Hat-tip: @org_scp). The original tweet can be seen below.

Just why Robert Malone would have chosen to repeat the content of the earlier tweet word-for-word is unclear. This appears to be bot-like behaviour. Furthermore, “Pelham” already had posted (not reposted) the same tweet several times over the last year, most recently on July 17^th, which is presumably when Robert Malone saw it. See here, here, and here. This too is bot-like behaviour. Pelham’s tweets have also invariably gone viral, raking in hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of views.

But the second even more serious problem with the tweet is that its core claim is patently false. Orgenesis is not owned by Pfizer. Orgenesis is a relatively closely held company, nearly 40% of whose shares are owned by just two people: Jacob Safier and Yehuda Nir. See the below chart from the Orgenesis annual report here (p. 75).

45% of the stock is held by the two principal owners plus officers of the company. Lists of institutional investors (including mutual funds) can be consulted here and here. Pfizer is nowhere to be found.

The claim that Pfizer owns Orgenesis appears to be a pure fabrication. And yet this pure fabrication has been trending wildly on X.

This is the third problem with the tweet. Elon Musk’s obligations toward the EU under the Digital Services Act – whose “goals of transparency, accountability and accuracy of information are aligned with ours”, Musk has said – include a commitment to combatting misinformation. Misinformation “safety labels” are built right into the code of the X algorithm, as can be seen below. Accounts or posts that get these labels slapped on them are having their visibility suppressed even if the account-owners are unaware. It is literally a system of “censoring without telling anyone”, to paraphrase a recent Musk remark.

Furthermore, Musk has repeatedly insisted – including in the above-cited tweet – that Community Notes would be “transformational” in achieving the goal of “accuracy of information”. Thus, posts which manage to achieve visibility or even start to go viral – perhaps because the account owner did not previously have a “safety label” on his or her account – will frequently be targeted by a “Community Note”, which essentially contests the veracity of the post right in the post!

But the Malone tweet and the prior “Pelham” tweets have trended unabated on X without a peep from “Community Notes” despite the fact that the core claim is false. The “Pelham” tweets have garnered over 3 million views and the Malone tweet, as of this writing, has surpassed 300K.

So, why does this patent misinformation trend?

I would submit that it is because the X algorithm in fact serves to do the exact opposite of what is claimed. It serves to amplify misinformation and suppress information.

That the X algorithm would work like this was in fact inevitable from the moment a political authority was made the arbiter of information and misinformation, of truth and falsity. The Digital Services Act (see here, here and here) makes the European Commission this arbiter, hence it is inevitable that the X algorithm, so long as X wants to remain on the EU market, will promote misinformation that the European Commission find useful and suppress information that is inconvenient for it.

Simply put, the Heiko von der Leyen/Orgenesis/Pfizer story is a red herring. It does not hurt Ursula von der Leyen. It helps her, precisely because it is bogus and by diverting attention from some inconvenient and verifiable facts.

These facts are the following:

1. The vaccine contract to which reference is made in the Malone/“Pelham” tweet was not a contract with Pfizer but rather with a consortium consisting of Pfizer and the German company BioNTech. BioNTech, moreover, is the marketing authorisation holder for the product in the EU, its legal manufacturer and has been the main financial beneficiary of its sales. (The value of the contract, by the way, was also not €71 billion. That was the value of contracts signed with all Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers.)

2. The German government (as documented here) has been the state sponsor of BioNTech during the company’s entire existence. Indeed, the German government sponsored the very founding of the company in 2008, as part of a “Go-Bio” programme whose objective was to make Germany into a world leader in biotechnologies.

3. Ursula von der Leyen was a member of the German government that sponsored the founding of BioNTech in 2008 and was a member of each of the three successive German governments that continued to subsidise the company during the lean years prior to Covid and into the Covid period. After she had resigned her position as Minister of Defence to become President of the European Commission, the last of the German governments in which von der Leyen served would go on to provide nearly €400 million in subsidies to BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine project. Under von der Leyen’s leadership, the EU itself provided another €150 million in debt financing to the company via the European Investment Bank. (For documentation, see here.)

This is the conflict of interest that has been at the very heart of the EU’s Covid-19 vaccine procurement process from the start. It has nothing to do with any personal conflict of interest of Ursula von der Leyen. It is an institutional conflict of interest involving the German government, a German government official who was parachuted into the position of European Commission president – i.e. Ursula von der Leyen – and a state-sponsored German company, BioNTech, which was the main commercial beneficiary of the EU’s programme of mass Covid-19 vaccination and the EU contracts.

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