Nested in the grand theatre of modern authoritarianism, few acts are as slick as the one scripted by Alphabet, Google's shadowy overlord. On the surface, it's the benevolent search giant, serving up answers to life's riddles. Dig deeper, and you find a data-devouring hydra with tentacles wrapped around Big Pharma, squeezing out billions while throttling any voice that dares question the vaccine gospel. Jeremy R. Hammond's latest takedown in The Defender peels back the curtain: Google's censorship of vaccine dissent didn't start with COVID-19 lockdowns or Biden's White House nudge; it was baked in from the jump, courtesy of Alphabet's biotech empire. And as the company pivots to "restore" some banned channels, the real question lingers: Is this contrition, or just a rebrand of the same old grift?
Hammond's piece lands like a hammer: Alphabet's September 2025 letter to lawmakers admits YouTube (Google-owned) caved to Biden-era pressure, yanking videos that didn't even breach its own rules. "Unacceptable and wrong," they call it, while swearing they only enforced their policies on "misinformation." Cute deflection, but those policies? Co-authored with the same CDC and WHO mandarins pushing the mass-vax agenda. The result? Truth gets the boot (lab-leak theories, lockdown harms, vaccine side effects) while official disinformation (e.g., "vaccines stop transmission" — until they didn't) sails unchallenged. Meta's Zuckerberg fessed up similarly in August, admitting Facebook nuked COVID facts under White House thumbscrews. But Hammond's killer hook: This wasn't a pandemic plot twist. Google was already in the censorship game, long before Wuhan wet markets or Warp Speed checks.
Flash back to 2019: YouTube's "Medical Misinformation Policy" was already a scalpel for vaccine heresy, banning content contradicting "health authority guidance" on shots' safety or efficacy. No smoking gun for pre-2020 enforcement? Hammond implies the infrastructure was primed, algorithms tuned to bury anti-vax searches, creators demonetised for daring to cite studies on aluminium adjuvants or MMR-autism links. By 2020, it scaled: YouTube axed 130,000 COVID videos, many just questioning mandates or efficacy. Fox Business docs from 2023 reveal White House-YouTube huddles in 2021, flagging "misinfo" on virus origins and vax risks. But the roots? Deeper, in Alphabet's pharma playground.
Enter Verily Life Sciences, Alphabet's "truth" squad hell-bent on "defeating Mother Nature." Born from Google X's "secret lab" in 2015, it's a data vacuum sucking up biometric gold, glucose via smart lenses (licensed to Novartis in 2014), surgical bots (JV with J&J, sold off in 2017), and "bioelectronic medicines" (Galvani with GSK, 2016). Sanofi's Onduo (2016) tracks diabetes via wearables and apps, now juiced with Fitbit data post-2021 acquisition. Project Baseline? A 10,000-volunteer gene grab for pharma R&D, rebooted as "Verily Me" in 2025, free app prompting "When was my last flu shot?" while funnelling records to partners like Pfizer, Otsuka, and Novartis. Consent? Sure, but data stays forever, feeding the beast.
GV (Google Ventures) kicked it off in 2009, bankrolling Flatiron Health ($8M in 2013, sold to Roche for $1.9B in 2018) and 23andMe's DNA-for-drugs pipeline. By 2019, Verily's inking deals with Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi for clinical trials, mining patient data via Google Cloud. Fast-forward to 2025: Verily's $1B+ war chest (Alphabet-led in 2022) funds "real-world evidence" for drug pipelines, but whispers of a sale or spin-off swirl; Heather Adkins testified in October it's being "decoupled" after two years of prep. Why now? Maybe the heat from censorship probes is singeing the tentacles.
COVID supercharged the symbiosis. Google-Apple's 2020 contact-tracing API fed "public health authorities" proximity pings, paving the way for vax passports. Verily's "Healthy at Work" app tracked symptoms, tests, and vax status for employers and unis, $38M CDC wastewater gig in the mix. WEF's CommonPass? Microsoft-VCI? All echoed Verily's blueprint: Apps as gatekeepers, data as the toll. As a UN hack at Davos 2022 crowed, Google helps governments "own the science" in search results.
Children's Health Defense's YouTube ban? Still in effect, despite Alphabet's "evolving policies." The May 2024 "Censorship-Industrial Complex" report exposed the web: Big Tech as Uncle Sam's enforcer. But Hammond's thesis holds: Pharma ties explain the prequel. Verily's not just a subsidiary, it's the profit engine, turning your Fitbit buzz into Pfizer's next blockbuster.
Alphabet's defence — "We resisted Biden!" — is pure theatre. The policies were always Pharma-friendly, data-hungry. Calico (anti-aging R&D), DeepMind (AI drug discovery), Isomorphic Labs (protein folding for therapies); it's a biotech blitzkrieg. Search "vaccine risks"? Buried under CDC links. Query autism links? Algorithmic amnesia. The UN's "own the science" quip? That's the mission statement.
In Trump's second act, with RFK Jr. at HHS, the grift's exposed, but Verily's decoupling smells like a firewall, not reform. Hammond's right: This isn't Biden's baby; it's Alphabet's. To break it, defund the data lords, audit the APIs, and amplify the banned.