Last fall, Megyn made headlines when she revealed that she “regretted” getting a COVID-19 booster shot because she subsequently tested positive “for an autoimmune issue” at her annual physical.
As it turns out, it wasn’t just social media that was paying attention to Megyn’s story. New reporting suggests the vaccine manufacturers flagged her remarks as cause for concern amid growing hesitancy around the shots.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Glenn Greenwald, host of Rumble’s System Update, to discuss Big Pharma’s surveillance of COVID criticism and the importance of independent media.
Megyn Speaks Out
During an interview with journalist David Zweig in September, Megyn opened up about her experience getting a third COVID-19 shot. “I do regret getting the vaccine – even though I’m a 52-year-old woman – because I don’t think I needed it,” she shared at the time. “I think I would have been fine.”
As she explained, she contracted COVID-19 “many times” anyway and also developed a secondary health concern that may be related to the shot. “For the first time, I tested positive for an autoimmune issue at my annual physical,” Megyn said.
She ended up consulting with a top rheumatologist in New York City, who agreed with her suspicions. “I said, ‘Do you think this could have to do with the fact that I got the damn booster and then got COVID within three weeks,’” Megyn recalled asking. “And she said, ‘Yes.’ I wasn’t the only one she’d seen with it.”
Moderna’s ‘Misinformation’ Campaign
The short clip of Megyn telling her story went viral on social media and led many in the press to write about it. According to a new report from journalist Lee Fang, it appears as though Megyn also caught the attention of Moderna.
In a two-part series published on his Substack in collaboration with RealClearInvestigations, Fang obtained exclusive internal documents from Moderna that show how the vaccine maker worked to monitor, suppress, and even attack online discourse about the COVID-19 shots.
After publishing part one of his report in November, Fang posted part two earlier this month and exposed how people like Alex Berenson, Russell Brand, Michael Shellenberger, Jay Bhattacharya, MD, and, yes, even Megyn, were targeted by Moderna’s “misinformation reporting system.”
According to Fang’s investigation, Moderna flagged Megyn’s clip about her autoimmune condition internally and warned her comments could “discourage people who are on the fence about getting vaccinated.” But that wasn’t all:
“In its alert about Kelly, the company noted that her comments added to growing concern around autoimmune disorders and COVID-19 vaccinations,” he wrote. “The Moderna misinformation email proceeded to offer data that appeared to reaffirm, rather than debunk, Kelly’s assertions. The alert concluded with a message about an NIH report that highlights a link between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and inflammatory and autoimmune skin diseases. Moderna did not dispute the findings of the NIH study, but noted that it “is in rotation in anti-vaccine spaces online.”
Megyn said you can’t help but notice the irony of how Moderna allegedly handled the situation. “They’re admitting internally that it’s a problem, but they’re upset that I am talking about it and Alex Berenson, and Russell Brand, and Michael Shellenberger, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya are talking about it because they don’t want it discussed,” she noted. “And the mainstream media outlets were only too happy to comply.”
The Need for Independent Media
In Greenwald’s view, stories like this only further highlight the need for independent media. “This is a perfect example of the kind of story that people ought to know, which is that you have these gigantic corporations with extreme amounts of financial power, and they had, in this case, a serious interest in constraining and restricting the range of debate that could be expressed,” he explained. “And they succeeded for a long time.”
With the coronavirus pandemic, Greenwald pointed out that debate of all kinds was surpressed. “They had Dr. Fauci pressuring a lot of the world’s immunologists to change their minds from what they originally said, that this was almost certainly a lab leak,” he said. “And then obviously questions about the vaccine, its efficacy, and its safety were something that was all but banished from mainstream media.”
As he explained, people were banned from platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (now X) for having ‘contrarian’ points of view and now it appears as though there were larger forces at play. “This is evidence that the whole time Moderna was playing a huge role in surveilling people questioning their product,” Greenwald said.
Ultimately, Megyn said it shines an important light on the state of media and overreach. “They [censored] without caring whether there was truth to it. They just didn’t like it,” she concluded. “That’s what’s led, in part, to the power and strength of outlets like ours.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Greenwald by tuning in to episode 712 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.