Project Veritas’s viral video claims Pfizer was intentionally mutating COVID strains: What reports say

A hugely viral video that purportedly shows a senior Pfizer employee talking about COVID-19 vaccine experiments has exploded across social media, gathering millions of views and sparking speculation

A hugely viral video that purportedly shows a senior Pfizer employee talking about COVID-19 vaccine experiments has exploded across social media, gathering millions of views and sparking speculation.

Released by Project Veritas, the video includes what it says is undercover footage of a conversation detailing COVID mutation projects, designed to pre-emptively research potential new strains of the virus before they may find root naturally.

In wake of this, many social media users have started to claim that the video proves that Pfizer is conducting these experiments actively.

Multiple claims on social media, posted on January 26, 2023, suggest that Pfizer is currently mutating COVID variants in order to produce vaccines for future sale.

The claims are based on a Project Veritas video, also posted on January 26, 2023, which on Twitter alone has been viewed more than 8.6 million times.

BREAKING: @Pfizer Exploring "Mutating" COVID-19 Virus For New Vaccines

"Don't tell anyone this…There is a risk…have to be very controlled to make sure this virus you mutate doesn't create something…the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest."#DirectedEvolution pic.twitter.com/xaRvlD5qTo

— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) January 26, 2023

Among them was a tweet, with more than 61,000 engagements, from Project Veritas CEO and founder James O’Keefe, who wrote: “Pfizer director on camera saying they are ‘mutating’ COVID-19 Virus to increase infectiousness. UNREAL!”.

It’s worth noting that Project Veritas, which describes itself as a “journalism enterprise“, is a controversial organization that has previously produced investigations subsequently labeled as false or unevidenced by fact-checkers and other media, a Newsweek report said.

Among other stories, in 2017, The Washington Post reported that O’Keefe had tried to dupe the paper into publishing a false story about former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Roy Moore.

In 2020, Project Veritas claimed that Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was linked to a “cash for ballots voter fraud scheme.” An investigation by USA Today found no evidence of such a scheme.

In 2021, it also claimed that during the New Jersey gubernatorial election an election worker illegally allowed someone who said they weren’t a U.S. citizen to fill out a ballot, which PolitiFact reported was false.

Whatever the facts are about its latest video, some of the claims that it has inspired misrepresent the content of the video itself.

The video shows a conversation between an unidentified reporter and an interviewee that Project Veritas identifies as “Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development – Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning”, Newsweek report further said.

According to Global Times report, an undercover video featuring an allegedly Pfizer executive bragging about how his company was exploring intentionally mutating COVID strains to profit from future mRNA vaccines has exploded across social media recently. 

In the video, Jordon Trishton Walker, described as Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning, claims that his company is exploring a way to “mutate” COVID via “Directed Evolution” to preempt the development of future vaccines. The man told a Project Veritas journalist about Pfizer’s plan for COVID vaccines, while acknowledging that people would not like this information if it went public. 

Pfizer on Friday issued a statement in response saying “in the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research,” but it added “In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.” 

The video has sparked wide public concern with over 41.2 million views on Twitter alone. 

Walker also bluntly said in the video that COVID is going to be a “cash cow” for Pfizer for a while going forward. Is Pfizer really manipulating COVID-19 for profits and does it in secret? How far has the research gone? What risks will it bring? The public naturally has many questions and demands answers. However, most of the US and Western mainstream media outlets and US politicians have collectively kept mum on the issue revealed in the video. This is quite abnormal in the American public opinion field known for its diversity.
The authenticity of this video has yet to be confirmed. In the face of public doubts, shouldn’t the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), lawmakers and the media conduct further investigations and give the public an explanation? 

Till now, the vast majority of US media outlets and politicians are ignoring it. This is in stark contrast to their keenness to hype the odds of new COVID mutations after China optimized its COVID policies. On the issue concerning a big US pharmaceutical company, it seems American media outlets are all much more “professional and rational.” They are quite prudent to make any conclusion.

If an undercover video of similar kind was exposed in China, there is no doubt that the Chinese public and officials would take it very seriously. Not only the company involved must give a detailed explanation, relevant authorities will quickly conduct an investigation to find the truth. 

Tucker Carlson, host of Fox News, was a rarity among US media persons on this issue as he touched upon the topic. “In this country, drug companies spend more on lobbying the Congress than any other industry, a lot more than any other industry and they don’t do it by accident. They do it because it pays off,” Tucker said.   

According to data from Pfizer, more than 4.3 billion Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines were shipped to 181 countries across the world by the late of 2022. Not long ago, Albert Bourla, Chief Executive Officer of Pfizer, encountered a series of tough questions from a journalist about the efficacy of its COVID vaccine on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum meeting.

“Western media doesn’t speak for truth, but is profits-oriented,” a Chinese expert who requires anonymity told the Global Times. “Everyone knows that major American pharmaceutical companies and capital-controlled mainstream media are inextricably linked by interests. The silence of many media outlets in face of the video once again reflects the hypocrisy of US media.”

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