Forbes Censors Kennedy VP Pick Nicole Shanahan’s Call to Investigate Big Pharma
Threat of Kennedy-appointed Presidential Commission looms large for pharmaceutical companies who dodged a bullet under Trump
It’s virtually conventional wisdom that Big Pharma’s large advertising buys with Big Media means that the industry carries outsized clout. Case in point: last Wednesday, Forbes edited out two minutes of the very first political speech by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s VP pick, Nicole Shanahan, who is a Silicon Valley lawyer, philanthropist, mother of an autistic child, and also a fellow Big Pharma critic.
During her speech before a packed venue in Oakland, Shanahan called for an investigation of Big Pharma and suggested that too many prescriptions and vaccines were amongst the factors driving the chronic disease epidemic now afflicting the country (discussed on a podcast with Kennedy and Dr. Mark Hyman).
“As Bobby says, we need to investigate every possible cause of the chronic disease epidemic that is devouring our nation from the inside,” said Shanahan, exhorting the crowd of supporters.
While Shanahan’s call for Big Pharma investigation was not censored by Forbes, the following portion of her speech was edited out from the Forbes Breaking News video post, in which she cites the reasons behind the call for a national inquiry:
Third, I’m sorry to say, is our medications. Pharmaceutical medicine has its place. But no single safety study can assess the impact of one prescription on top of another prescription and one shot on top of another shot, on top of another shot throughout the course of childhood. We just don’t do that study right now and we ought to. We can and we will.
Conditions like autism used to be 1 in 10,000. Now, here in the state of California, it is 1 in 22. 1 in 22 affected. Allergies, obesity, anxiety, depression – our children are not well. Our people are not well. And our country will not be well for very much longer if we don’t heed this desperate call for attention.
I’ve spoken to government agencies, I’ve spoken to senators. I’ve spoken to governors. They all know something is wrong, but none of them take any action. There is only one candidate I have met for president who takes the chronic disease epidemic seriously and that’s Robert Kennedy Jr. and I will be his ally in making our nation healthy again. Yes.
Shanahan’s whole speech, unedited, uncensored, can be viewed here on YouTube. The original version and the edited version can be viewed side by side in a post by Spaces X host and Kennedy supporter, Holden Culotta (@Holden_Culotta).
Mark Gorton, co-founder of the Kennedy SuperPAC and the Honest Media Project, was interviewed by Politico for a report on the vice-presidential nominee:
Shanahan, a tech attorney and entrepreneur, spoke about her child’s autism diagnosis and environmental factors that may contribute to disease at Tuesday’s event announcing her selection in Oakland, California. Gorton saw this as her suggesting that her child was vaccine-injured, and he felt Shanahan was being censored because news networks didn’t show her full speech.
“She alluded to it. She basically said that there [are] chemical exposures, electromagnetic [pollution] and medicine. So she was broad and she was soft. This is still a watered-down version of how you would say it,” Gorton said of Shanahan’s speech. “But even that watered-down version was too much.”
“We have an epidemic of vaccine injuries in this country, and that is a subject that’s verboten,” Gorton said.
The inference from Shanahan’s bold call for an investigation was that if the independent ticket of Kennedy and Shanahan ascends to the White House, they would establish a presidential commission to leave no stone unturned in an unprecedented investigation of Big Pharma, its medicines and vaccines, and the chronic disease epidemic now afflicting our nation.
In a poignant and insightful twist, Kennedy was asked nearly seven years ago to chair just such a commission by then President-elect Donald Trump who took the momentous step of meeting with Kennedy and laying out a plan for an investigation into vaccine safety.
In a story shared on Rubin Reports that Kennedy tells frequently, he got to work immediately after the Trump meeting by talking with Fauci and others at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Meanwhile, however, Trump met with those who would be the subject of the investigation including Pfizer executives and vaccine-booster Bill Gates. Suddenly, following a $1 million gift from Pfizer and one of $500,000 from Amgen, both for his inaugural ball, Trump abandoned the investigation of vaccines he had asked Kennedy to lead.
That Trump’s initial principled stand on vaccines could so easily be abandoned is testimony not only to his ethics and character (or lack thereof), but also to the corrupting power of Big Pharma. This message from Kennedy has been consistent – what he calls the “corporate capture” of the regulatory agencies (CDC, NIH, FDA, EPA) by the very companies they are meant to regulate.
In this case, it was Pfizer who “captured” the president-elect who had just asked likely the most high-profile and qualified vaccine-safety advocate to chair a Commission, but, following donations from pharmaceutical companies, reversed course.
Healthy diet advocate Kristen D. Tidwell (@KristenDTidwell on X) was first to flag Forbes’ censorship of Nicole Shanahan. It was then subsequently reported on by citizen journalist and frequent X SPACES host Holden Culotta in a post that included the Forbes censored video clip alongside the full clip and shared by Kennedy’s campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox. The conversation that followed Holden’s X post, while deriding Forbes, celebrated the emergence of independent media.
“Yeah…the decentralized group of podcasts and independent platforms we have now surpass MSM’s reach.,” wrote Culotta, tamping down concern that the censored Forbes post would limit the reach of Shanahan’s speech.
Indeed, Kennedy’s announcement and Shanahan’s speech was watched on various platforms by millions of people. Meanwhile, in the fallout of Culotta’s post, Forbes took down its censored video of Shanahan’s speech which is no longer available.
A search by Honest Media did not turn up a repost on YouTube of the speech from Forbes. However, a condensed version of Kennedy’s introduction of his VP pick was posted on the site.
Personally, I'm liking Shanahan more and more with each passing day. She still has some questions to answer but, thus far, I like all the answers I've heard.