Selling Death: The CEO of CCDH in his own words

and them to sort of restrain rather than to punish or to say you guys are awful people is is just saying please stop. It is just please stop doing this cuz you are killing people with your misinformation, literally. Killing people with your misinformation. Kennedy, you're right. He was an environmental lawyer. He's done great things on clean water. He has done amazing things in his life. He has now started telling Californian, you know, slightly kooky health alternative stuff. It's the you know, in the end he it's

someone masquerading as kind of hippy dippy and uh and green and liberal and is actually selling death. Right. Now, his his partner is Kelly Brogan. >> is performative. Performative for the headlines that it generates. So, if you take for example the disinformation that I did, a piece of research which has been verified, corroborated. It was the Surgeon General cited it in his advisory on disinformation. President Biden used it when he accused Facebook of being killers. He says they're hosting these 12 people who produce 65% of

misinformation. Do something about it. They're breaking the rules, get rid of them. If you if you guys want to do something, I can tell you that still today they've only taken down 50% of their accounts. And these are people who serially post misinformation. Telling people to inhale bleach. Telling people that they shouldn't trust doctors. Telling people that they that COVID isn't dangerous and isn't killing people. Um which is lies. I mean even now misrepresenting the number of people who have taken The man you just heard

is Imran Ahmed. He is the founder and chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a UK and US registered non-profit whose declared mission is to remove voices it labels harmful from social media platforms. On March 24th, 2021, CCDH published a 26-page document titled The Disinformation Dozen. It named 12 American citizens, physicians, scientists, authors, and journalists, and asserted that 12 of us were responsible for 65% of all vaccine-related misinformation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Within 48 hours, that single unverified claim was repeated on the

floor of the United States Congress, cited by the Surgeon General of the United States, and used by President Joseph R. Biden to publicly accuse the platforms of killing people. I am one of the 12 named. My name is Sayer Ji, founder of GreenMedInfo. This is the record of what was said about us. In Imran Ahmed's own voice. And what it has cost. The 65% claim was the load-bearing wall of the entire campaign. It was all so wrong. Internally, Facebook's own data team, on the very same

day CCDH released its report, measured the actual figure. According to whistleblower Frances Haugen's disclosures and Facebook's own statement to the Washington Post on August 18th, 2021, the disinformation dozen accounted for approximately 0.05%, 5/100 of 1% C of vaccine-related content views. That is an overstatement by a factor of roughly 1,300 to 1. CCDH has never retracted the report. It has never issued a correction. It is cited in US and UK legislative records to this day. Once the number entered the bloodstream of public discourse, it was rebroadcast

at scale. NPR's All Things Considered profiled CCDH on May 12th, 2021. PBS NewsHour returned to the report as recently as December 2025. The United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, the European Union's Digital Services Act, and at least three US Congressional hearings cite the figure as if it were established fact. The author of that figure, Imran Ahmed, has used those hearings to do something more than report data. He has named individuals. And he has called them killers. The sort of wellness yoga crowd. Um you know, she's she's

very good at it. Uh Sayer Ji, who runs and another guy who runs an alternative health website. Now, I've heard of this website actually. I didn't know his name, but GreenMedInfo. I've definitely seen this one going around. Yeah, he's got a real thing for me at the moment. He's keeps tweeting about us uh making content. >> UK as a child. You know, you looked up to the Kennedy dynasty, these amazing liberal icons. But he's killing black people with the misinformation that he spreads. And so, that's

why we've demanded that he be de-platformed today. Right. Right. And and for people who don't know, I guess to make it with um Quack Carney be a good English uh US word, I guess? Um not really, but yeah. No, they're like >> [laughter] >> they're basically snake oil salesmen, and they are spreading misinformation for economic profit. Look, there are four reasons that people spread misinformation, whether it's about hate or whatever else. There's economic gain, there's personal gain, there's political So, sorry, there's political gain, there is

um because they have a psychopathalogical need to spread that mis to cause pain and to cause chaos, and something called negative social potency, or because they're genuinely misinformed. And and and my And of course, they led directly to people. You saw again and again in the witness testimony of people uh who were charged with crimes relating to the January the 6th insurrection at the Capitol, about four blocks down from my house here. Or it is um or it's the testimony of my friends and my colleagues

who work in the medical profession who told me about people who were choking to death in ICUs begging for a vaccine that they had once thought would harm them and that it was now too late to administer. And many of those people went on to die. So, there are human beings, there are tragedies, there are families today bereft because directly of the disinformation that was pumped actively as an active deliberate publishing to people. There are people today in terror attacks that we know have been uh

victims of terror attacks. Their families I was speaking in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life synagogue quite recently and again, we see the effect of you know, these these these uh conspiracy theories being force-fed to people such that they think it is acceptable and normal and that other people would approve that they killed people because of the God they worship or who it is that they choose to love. practice. On March the 24th, we released a report showing that up to 65% of anti-vax content circulating

on Facebook and Twitter, 65% originates with sites and accounts operated by just 12 anti-vaxers, the disinformation dozen. Uh this committee asked Mark Zuckerberg about the report in a hearing the next day on March the 25th. He promised to do something about it. He did not. Six months later, after the Surgeon General and the President weighed in, again citing our report, Facebook responded claiming our report had a faulty narrative. However, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that on the very same day we released our report, March the

24th, Facebook produced an internal study confirming that a tiny number of accounts were responsible for more than half of anti-vaccine content on their platform. So, they were lying. While the American public was suffering under COVID and people were dying. The members of this committee have seen the same tactic >> In his own voice, Imran Ahmed has made the case in scripted speeches and in casual interviews. The most unguarded of these is a March 2021 appearance on the Doomed with Matt Binder podcast, recorded shortly before the

Disinformation Dozen report was made public. In it, he names me directly. is actually selling death. That is the operative phrase. It is not hedged. It is not framed as opinion. It is an assertion of fact naming a specific living person broadcast publicly on a third-party podcast. Under New York Times versus Sullivan and its progeny, particularly when the speaker is shown to have access to data that contradicts the claim, this is the textbook predicate for a defamation action. The selling death frame is not isolated. It is

the rhetorical signature of every public appearance Ahmed gives. Watch the pattern. Killers, snake oil salesmen, psychopaths, murderers, selling death. This is the vocabulary repeated across a podcast in 2021, the floor of the US House of Representatives in 2021, the Canadian Parliament, the CCDH Global Summit in 2022, the Eradicate Hate Global Summit in 2023, the UK Online Safety Bill hearings, and the BBC. Now, let us be precise about what the named 12 actually did. GreenMedInfo, the platform Imran Ahmed told a podcast host was selling death, has

since 2008 indexed roughly 70,000 peer-reviewed studies from the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed database. It does not sell pharmaceuticals. It does not sell vaccines. It does not sell death. Of the 12 named in CCDH's report, at least five are licensed physicians. One is now a sitting US cabinet secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2025. One is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. Christiane Northrup. One is a chiropractor and educator. One is a former teacher. None of the 12 have

ever been charged, sanctioned, or sued for the conduct CCDH alleged. They were named. And once they were named, the platforms were instructed to act. What separates this case from ordinary defamation is what happened after Ahmed spoke. Within 4 months of the Disinformation Dozen report, the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, formally cited it in his July 15th, 2021 advisory on health misinformation. The next day, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed at a briefing that the administration was flagging problematic posts for Facebook. Hours

later, President Biden told reporters the platforms were killing people. He used Imran Ahmed's word. Internal communications later released in the Twitter files and in Missouri versus Biden, now styled Murthy versus Missouri before the US Supreme Court, Kiruba Sivasubramanian for Darrell Foote of Facebook and Andy Stone, specifically referencing CCDH's list when instructing platforms to suspend accounts. Bailed out of Judge Terry A. Doughty's preliminary injunction of July 4th, 2023, found the government's conduct arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history. A private, foreign-funded

NGO supplied the list. The US government acted on it. That is the architecture of the case now being litigated. The clearest acknowledgement of the linkage came from the US State Department itself on the record on PBS NewsHour in December of 2025 when it confirmed that CCDH's report was a documentary basis for the US government's then pending immigration action against Imran Ahmed personally on grounds of foreign interference in US domestic discourse. In other words, even the United States government now treats the Disinformation Dozen as a foreign

origin information operation, not a public health report. What the record now shows. CCDH presents itself as a grassroots civil society organization. The funding record tells a different story. Public filings show CCDH receiving capital, in-kind support, or strategic communications cooperation from foundations and entities including the Open Society Foundations, the Reset Initiative funded by Pierre Omidyar, and figures connected to the Atlantic Council whose international advisory board at the time the Disinformation Dozen was authored included seven former directors of the US Central Intelligence Agency. CCDH's own founding board

chair, Simon Clark, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. This is the institutional context in which the word grassroots is used. On May 15th, 2025, a 171-page federal civil rights complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Plaintiffs include Dr. Christiane Northrup, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, Dr. Ben Tapper, Rizza Islam, Erin Elizabeth Finn, and me, Sayer Ji. Named as defendants, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, its CEO Imran Ahmed personally, senior officials of the prior administration, and the technology

platforms that executed the deplatforming. The complaint alleges a coordinated multi-year operation of government private collusion, defamation, first and fifth amendment violations, and economic destruction. It seeks not damages alone, but a structural injunction, a binding federal precedent that the United States government cannot launder censorship through a foreign-funded private entity. This documentary is a contemporaneous public record of the words at the heart of that case in the defendants' own voice, preserved here for the court, the press, and the public. For me, personally, every social media platform of

any size, gone. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers, gone. The income that supported my family, gone. The work product of 17 years removed in a single weekend in 2022. For my colleagues, Dr. Northrup, Dr. Tenpenny, Dr. Tapper, Rizza Islam, Erin Elizabeth, and others not named in CCDH's report but caught in its drift, medical licenses challenged, practices shuttered, families harassed, in two instances, lives placed under physical threat. None of us were charged with a crime. None of us were given a hearing. None of us were given the

right to confront our accuser. The accuser was a private citizen of the United Kingdom working from Washington D.C. Funded by foundations whose donors will not appear in court until now. This film is not advocacy. It is a record. Every quotation used here was spoken by Imran Ahmed in public on a recorded platform with a verifiable time code and source URL listed on screen. Every claim made by this narrator about the disinformation doesn't report and its aftermath is sourced to a peer-reviewed study, a court filing, an

internal corporate document released under sworn whistleblower disclosure, or an official government communication. The case is now before a federal court. The record is now in your hands. The man who said we were selling death will, in due course, be asked to say so under oath. Until then, this is what he said when he thought no one was keeping count. Someone was.