In March 2021, one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published its list of “leading online anti-vaxxers,” dubbed “The Disinformation Dozen.”
The impact was immediate.
Social media giants began deplatforming some of the people on the list.
Key Biden administration officials publicly referenced the list and its members, and accused them of spreading dangerous “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
The “Twitter Files,” released in 2022 and 2023, showed that Big Tech worked with the government to censor not only those on the “Disinformation Dozen” list, but also anyone with a significant online following who published content that contradicted the official COVID-19 narrative.
That included Children’s Health Defense (CHD), which on Aug. 17, 2022, was kicked off major social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
CHD wasn’t on the “Disinformation Dozen” list — but its founder and then-chairman, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was.
“When the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ list was published, Kennedy was still chairman of CHD,” said CHD CEO Mary Holland. “Silencing his voice meant silencing ours — because at the time, his name was synonymous with that of CHD, the organization he founded and led.”
When Kennedy left CHD to run for U.S. president, it was no longer possible for the government and the CCDH to censor him. “His social media channels were restored,” Holland said. “But to this day, CHD is still being censored.”
Much has changed since 2021. Kennedy is now U.S. health secretary, leading the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda.
Many of the “Disinformation Dozen” continue to actively write, produce documentaries and advocate for health freedom.
Social media platforms and CEOs, including Mark Zuckerberg, have since acknowledged that they censored the list’s members at the Biden administration’s request.
Some media outlets have walked back previous negative coverage of the list’s members.
What about the originator of the “Disinformation Dozen” list? Internal documents leaked in 2024 showed that CCDH planned to launch “black ops” against Kennedy. The group has been linked to the Democratic Party and to “dark money” networks — including to billionaire financier George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.
CCDH is now the subject of a congressional investigation. Its CEO, Imran Ahmed — tied to key figures in the U.K. government, including some with links to financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — is facing deportation from the U.S.
This week, six of the list’s members — Charlene Bollinger, Erin Elizabeth, Kevin Jenkins, Sayer Ji, Ben Tapper and Dr. Sherri Tenpenny — spoke to The Defender about how inclusion on the list impacted their lives and livelihoods, the extent to which they continue to face censorship today, the investigations targeting CCDH, and lawsuits they are part of which are related to the censorship they faced.
Other ”Disinformation Dozen” members, including Kennedy; holistic psychiatrist Dr. Kelly Brogan; physician Dr. Joseph Mercola; OB-GYN physician Dr. Christiane Northrup; and educator, activist and health advocate Rizza Islam, could not be reached for comment. Dr. Rashid Buttar died in 2023.
Several of the list’s members — and Holland — will participate in a MAHA Action Media Hub event Wednesday on censorship and repression.
‘Like a witch hunt’
Erin Elizabeth, founder of Health Nut News, said being included on the “Disinformation Dozen” list was “like a witch hunt.”
“I’ve been banned five times on Instagram,” she said. “I’ve been banned so many times on TikTok I’ve lost count. The last time was for simply quoting Kennedy. It was tragic to lose millions of followers on Facebook alone, let alone six figures on my other platforms, some of which I’d had over 20 years.”
Elizabeth suggested that the list’s members were deplatformed in a coordinated manner. “They wiped us out, most of us, within a half hour of one another,” she said.
Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo, said the CCDH report “was not journalism. It was a targeting document.” He said that within weeks of its publication, “I was deplatformed across YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest … GreenMedInfo lost most of its organic traffic overnight.”
Ben Tapper, a chiropractor and host of “Dr. Ben Tapper’s Podcast,” said he was targeted soon after a speech he gave in Omaha, Nebraska, opposing COVID-19 mask mandates.
“After that speech, my social media was reaching millions of people per month, and we were raising funds for our documentary,” Tapper said. “Then President Biden called us out in a press hearing, and all my social media was deleted.
Tapper subsequently faced five account deletions on Instagram and bans on TikTok and Twitter — now X.
Sherri Tenpenny, a physician and host of “The Tenpenny Files” podcast, said she “lost hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Podbean.”
Kevin Jenkins, vice president of the lobbying firm Right Turn Strategies, said he was deplatformed from Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for “a long period of time.”
‘Designed to create a chilling effect’
Deplatforming was not limited to social media platforms. Tapper and Tenpenny said they were banned from financial platforms, including PayPal and Venmo.
Charlen Bollinger, founder of The Truth About Vaccines and The Truth About Cancer (TTAC), said Google “has strangled” her ability to reach the public through her email lists.
Several of the list’s members said inclusion on the list harmed them professionally.
Bollinger said the censorship “has disrupted our business to the point where we have really struggled financially, which has resulted in our inability to produce and reach millions of people.”
“Immediately our income was cut down considerably, and I had to let my own aunt go, who had worked for me for some time and is a single mother,” Elizabeth said. “I couldn’t afford to keep her on.”
Tapper said that when the “Disinformation Dozen” list was published, “we were slandered falsely in the media, I lost patients in my clinic and received messages from thousands of people stating that I was a threat to public health.”
Several of the list’s members said they were subjected to personal attacks and harm to their personal and family lives. According to Tapper:
“I lost close friends who thought I was on the wrong side of history. My home was broken into, my clinic was vandalized, I received death threats, my phone and my wife’s phone were hacked. We received hundreds of texts per day.
“My clinic was vandalized, I had people protesting at my office, my truck was vandalized, and I had physical altercations in public. Family members disowned us, separated themselves.”
Ji said the “Disinformation Dozen” list accomplished multiple objectives for CCDH.
“The financial impact was severe and sustained. But beyond the economics, the designation was designed to create a chilling effect on anyone who might cite our research or collaborate with us. It worked, for a time,” he said.
Holland said CHD is still subject to this chilling effect. She said:
“We continue to endure an unprecedented level of censorship across search engines and social media, including Facebook and Instagram, where our accounts, which had millions of followers, have not been restored.
“This censorship hurts our organization. But worse than that, it prevents the public from accessing scientific and medical information, thus depriving Americans of the right to make critical decisions about their health, based on true informed consent.”
‘Underlying infrastructure of suppression remains largely intact’
Five years on, a new administration is in government, and the public climate surrounding vaccines and vaccine safety has shifted.
But several members of the “Disinformation Dozen” said they remain censored on most social media platforms and that accounts that were restored reach a smaller audience.
“Among the channels we lost, most recently YouTube reinstated our TTAC channel with 164,000 subscribers. But this channel is heavily shadowbanned, so our community can’t find our films when we release them,” Bollinger said.
Ji said YouTube restored his channels late last year, “acknowledging that the content had never violated their community guidelines.”
“That acknowledgment, quiet as it was, is its own indictment of what happened in 2021,” Ji said. But Ji said he is “still navigating suppression in search, and the shadow of the CCDH designation lingers in ways that are difficult to quantify but unmistakable in practice.”
Jenkins said he feels “without a shadow of a doubt” that he is “still being hampered.” His Instagram account, which previously had about 30,000 followers, has lost many of those followers. “It’s never allowed me to grow,” he said.
Tapper described a similar experience with Instagram. “I feel like my Instagram account isn’t allowing for growth, and every month I lose anywhere from 700 to 800 followers. It has been that way for a couple of years,” he said.
“We have lost at least 1 million followers and subscribers,” Bollinger said. “And while we still have 1.1 million followers on Facebook, 152,000 followers on Instagram and 66,000 followers on X, we can’t reach them due to the intense censorship.”
Some “Disinformation Dozen” members suggested that shadowbanning is applied unevenly — to specific posts or to stifle accounts showing signs of growth.
“I feel like certain posts are being shadowbanned and censored,” Tapper said. “It all depends on what I post. I feel like if you are over the target, you will be shadowbanned or censored.”
Elizabeth said that every time she gains some traction, “they ban my page and I have to start over. This has happened numerous times on every platform except X.”
Tapper and Elizabeth said that only X has restored their previously banned accounts. According to Tenpenny, though, shadowbanning continues to take place on YouTube, where the accounts of YouTube users who interview her are removed, and on X, despite the free speech promises of the platform’s owner, Elon Musk.
“I was reinstated on X [but] we are severely shadowbanned — we’ve only grown by a few thousand followers in 2025, even though I’ve been speaking and have been a guest on huge platforms,” Tenpenny said.
Jenkins said he is engaged in a daily effort to “work around the algorithms” and discuss topics such as chronic illness.
Several of the list’s members, including Bollinger, Elizabeth, Ji, Tapper and Tenpenny, said they have been able to bypass censorship on Substack, where they have built a substantial audience.
Elizabeth said she has secured a book deal. Ji is working on a book examining the links between Epstein, Bill Gates and pandemic preparedness.
The Bollingers just released a film, “Censored: The Fight for the First Amendment,” which “exposes the unholy alliance between government power, Big Tech monopolies, and billionaire-funded NGOs.”
“Things have changed in our ability to talk about these things publicly without the fear of being attacked as we were during the COVID years,” Bollinger said.
“That is the thing the deplatformers consistently underestimate: you cannot algorithmically delete a relationship built on substance over two decades,” Ji said. He warned that “the underlying infrastructure of suppression remains largely intact.”
Ongoing lawsuits challenge censorship tied to the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ list
Today, several of the list’s members are involved in legal challenges related to the censorship they experienced. This includes CHD’s antitrust lawsuit against the Trusted News Initiative — a partnership formed by Reuters, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, BBC and others.
The lawsuit, filed in 2023, alleges that the Trusted News Initiative violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by collectively colluding with tech giants to censor independent news outlets in a move designed specifically to cripple the smaller publishers’ ability to compete.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest supporting the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which include CHD, Bollinger, Mercola and Tapper.
In a lawsuit filed last year, several of the list’s members — Elizabeth, Islam, Ji, Northrup, Tapper and Tenpenny — sued CCDH and Ahmed, Google, Meta and X, and several agencies and officials from the current and previous administrations.
Ji said the lawsuit “challenges the government’s role in coordinating censorship of protected speech.”
In another case, Bollinger sued Google, Meta, X and several federal agencies in December 2024, “for using social media platforms as the tools to silence us.”
Ji said he is also involved in a legal case in the U.K. seeking his immediate arrest and confiscation of his equipment. He described this as “a situation in which my protected American speech was cited in foreign criminal proceedings.”
The list’s members welcomed the congressional investigation and deportation proceedings CCDH and Ahmed face.
“The effort to deport Imran Ahmed is, from where I sit, a measure of how thoroughly the architecture he helped construct has been exposed,” Ji said. “The vindication is real, but it comes at a cost that the people targeted have already paid.”
Tapper called Ahmed “a serious threat” to free speech and said the American people “deserve transparency about the networks, funding and influence” behind CCDH.
“While we are happy to see Imran Ahmed and the CCDH in this fire, and hopefully removed from the U.S., he needs to also face justice for his crimes,” Bollinger said.
The list’s members dismissed acknowledgements by Zuckerberg and Big Tech platforms about the censorship they engaged in.
“The admission did not come with accountability or restoration of what was lost,” Ji said. “It came as a casual acknowledgment in a changed political environment. That should trouble everyone regardless of where they sit politically. If the infrastructure exists to suppress speech at government request, it will be used again,” Ji said.
Bollinger said she was hopeful that Zuckerberg and Google were sincere when they claimed they “targeted and censored us and others like us only because ‘the government made me do it,’” but added, “the proof is in the pudding. We are still being targeted and censored.”
Jenkins, who is politically active in New Jersey, credited Kennedy with helping to deliver a “seismic shift” in how the public discusses topics such as vaccines today.
“I speak to a lot of people daily, and the fear that they had about discussing it prior has changed,” Jenkins said. “I’m very encouraged about the work that Kennedy is doing. He’s up against a Herculean group of people that want to continue to lie to Americans and lie to the world, and they’re fighting him at all levels.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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