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COVID-19

The Federal Government Paid Media Outlets to Promote the Covid Vaccine

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11 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

BY Rav AroraRAV ARORA

After releasing my three-part series earlier this year showing how multiple media outlets refused to platform dissent on the Covid vaccine, I was asked on multiple podcasts why this was the case. Ideological groupthink, fear of exacerbating institutional distrust, and financial motives were on my list of potential explanations, but I did not have concrete evidence.

As I highlighted in my first piece, the responses I got from editors claiming their publication’s “pro-vaccine” allegiance was quite jarring. More than anything else, a publication should be “pro-truth” — whether that means highlighting the astounding benefits of a therapeutic or exposing its serious side effects. The idea that a whole media corporation would take a firm stance on a novel, experimental product is antithetical to the core purpose of journalism.

As I’ve said many times before, we are a pro-vaccination newspaper, and personally I just wish everyone would get vaccinated already.

Editor response to Rav Arora’s story proposals on vaccine risks

As it turns out, mainstream media’s nearly monolithic coverage of mRNA vaccines and other Covid measures can be at least partially explained by a clear financial interest. Recently, independent journalist Breanna Morello — who left Fox News because of draconian vaccine mandates in New York City — alerted me to a FOIA request filed by the conservative media company TheBlaze, which found a number of major media outlets were paid to promote the Covid vaccine.

Such venues included the Washington PostLos Angeles Times, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and several others. TheBlaze’s report received little coverage — even in conservative media (perhaps because some of those outlets were also paid by HHS) ideologically predisposed to criticize government-fuelled narratives on the pandemic. As The Blaze reports:

Hundreds of news organizations were paid by the federal government to advertise for the vaccines as part of a “comprehensive media campaign,” according to documents TheBlaze obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services. The Biden administration purchased ads on TV, radio, in print, and on social media to build vaccine confidence, timing this effort with the increasing availability of the vaccines.

During the vaccine rollout, the Biden administration made a number of efforts to bolster vaccination rates. The US Department of Health and Human Services’ COVID-19 Public Education Campaign states they employed “both paid advertising and media interviews, presentations, radio/TV tours, and other public events to educate people about the importance of vaccination.”

The L.A Times – an outlet funded by HHS to promote Covid vaccines – runs a morally reprehensible column justifying mockery of ‘anti-vaxxer’ deaths.

The HHS website contains public access to all vaccine campaign advertisements for media outlets and beyond. One past advertisement promotes Covid vaccination in children, featuring a montage of selected medical doctors stating in unison,

We can all agree on this: you can trust the Covid vaccine for yourself, or your kids, or your grandkids….I mean it from the heart.

In another ad directed to parents, HHS’ selection of doctors state,

We want you to know, Covid vaccines are ‘safe and effective’.’ My grandkids are vaccinated…what’s not safe is getting Covid.

Is it ethical for the government to dubiously claim Covid vaccines are uniformly beneficial for kids, and contracting Covid is far less “safe” than getting your child double-vaccinated? No such randomized clinical evidence exists suggesting the benefits of the Covid vaccine outweigh the harms in young cohorts with a nearly zero risk of serious outcomes. The concentrated risk of myocarditis in boys and menstrual irregularities in girls suggest the Covid vaccine may be harmful on net. Moreover, is it ethical (for either party) for the federal government to advertise such medical misinformation on platforms allegedly committed to investigating the truth and holding the powerful accountable?

HHS advertisement on the updated Covid booster

A new government ad on the HHS website now promotes the updated Covid vaccine. It falsely claims the new booster shot prevents long Covid and hospitalization when the only available evidence from Pfizer and Moderna are rat studies and a 50-person trial (with an unexplained 2% rate of serious adverse events).

Rather than critically covering such propagandistic attempts to promote a longitudinally ineffective therapeutic with a 1 in 800 serious adverse event rate, major media outlets allowed the federal government to freely spread its misinformation on their platform. The New York Times’ reporting on vaccine-induced myocarditis, for example, downplayed the side effect at every sight and compared it to misleadingly higher rates of Covid-induced myocarditis:

For over two years, the media and government officials have been peddling dangerous misinformation — the very sin they accuse of the conspiracy web of committing — about COVID-19 posing a higher risk to young people than the vaccine. Instead of examining age, gender, and health-stratified risk-benefit ratios, they elementarily look at aggregate data and cherry-pick seemingly beneficial outcomes to justify their “Everyone should get vaccinated!” campaign. A few of umpteen examples:

CNBC: “Myocarditis risk higher after Covid infection than Pfizer or Moderna vaccination, CDC finds

Reuters: “Higher risk of heart complications from COVID-19 than vaccines -study”

CNN: “Pediatric cardiologists explain myocarditis and why your teen should still get a Covid-19 vaccine

The Conversation: “Myocarditis: COVID-19 is a much bigger risk to the heart than vaccination

As an admittedly biased Zoomer, one of the most discrediting media assault campaigns grew in opposition to Joe Rogan’s claim in a June 2021 podcast that healthy 21-year-olds didn’t need the vaccine. Over two years later, Rogan’s judgment has been vindicated — as it was at the time — given the 0.003% mortality risk among 20-year-olds and unusually high rates of myocardial and menstrual-related vaccine adverse events. However, the mainstream media ecosystem conducted a fierce reputational decapitation in response to Rogan’s impermissible dissent from the CDC and Pfizer’s edicts:

The Washington PostJoe Rogan is using his wildly popular podcast to question vaccines. Experts are fighting back.

The AtlanticJoe Rogan’s Show May Be Dumb. But Is It Actually Deadly?

Today: Dr. Fauci says Joe Rogan ‘incorrect’ to tell young people not to get vaccinated

NBC: Joe Rogan’s Covid vaccine misinfo matters

The United States wasn’t alone in spending large sums of taxpayer dollars to promote its agenda. The Trudeau government invested over $600,000 in hiring social media influencers to advance federal directives, including the push for Canadians to get vaccinated and boosted.

As CTV reports, Health Canada spent the most on hiring influencers to promote government information; $130,600 was spent towards an “influencer campaign in support of the COVID-19 vaccination marketing and advertising campaign.”

None of this is to mention Pfizer’s vaccine campaigns paying celebrities to rhapsodize about marvellously ‘safe and effective’ mRNA inoculation. Travis Kelce — a professional football player watched and revered by many young American men in particular — promoted getting the updated booster shot and flu vaccine in the same visit.

The journalists I grew up admiring — such as Megyn Kelly, Glenn Greenwald, Alex Berenson (Unreported Truths), and Matt Taibbi (Racket News) — were known for challenging consensus and providing novel perspectives on complex sociopolitical topics. I relied on select journalistic outlets and individual commentators for an honest, independent evaluation of the facts.

The heavily biased coverage of race relations and criminal justice issues in 2020 following the tragic death of George Floyd was self-discrediting but hardly surprising given the dominance of identity politics in elite liberal discourse.

The deterioration of journalistic standards during the vaccine rollout beginning in 2021, however, was particularly disorienting. The Washington Post, NBC, and the New York Times should have held the Biden administration’s feet to the fire for promoting experimental vaccines in all Americans irrespective of risk and continued revelations regarding concerning side effects.

They miserably failed to do so.

The last standing bulwark against government propaganda and censorship is crumbling before our eyes, losing relevance by the month. Perhaps a solution for media institutions to earn back credibility is to critically cover federal agencies misinforming the public rather than take funds to promote their agendas.

Just a thought.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Rav Arora

    Rav Arora is an independent journalist based in Vancouver, Canada.

COVID-19

Leaked documents: German gov’t lied about shots preventing COVID, knew lockdowns did more harm than good

Published on

Berlin, Germany – 24 March 2020: The sign in front of the Robert Koch-Institut in Berlin.

From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

Germany’s top health agency privately admitted that the idea of a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ is ‘not correct’ but supported it because it ‘serves as an appeal to all those who have not been vaccinated,’ leaked documents revealed.

Leaked documents from a top German health agency show that politicians knew the experimental COVID shots did not prevent the transmission of the virus but advocated for jab mandates anyway.

On July 23, independent journalist Aya Velázquez published the un-redacted miutes of the German Robert Koch Institut (RKI, comparable to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) from its meetings regarding the COVID crisis between 2020 and 2023. Velázquez said she received the un-redacted documents from a whistleblower who used to work for the RKI. Parts of the so-called “RKI files” had already been published in March this year, after the RKI was forced to publish them due to a lawsuit. However, many key parts of the files had been redacted.

Velázquez wrote that the now fully un-redacted files show “that the RKI unfortunately spoke out in favor of both facility-based and general compulsory vaccination despite the knowledge of the lack of protection from transmission and serious side effects.”

The minutes from an RKI meeting on November 5, 2021, demonstrate that the idea of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” that was propagated by politicians and mainstream media members was made up and not based on any facts.

“The media are talking about a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the minutes state. “From a factual point of view this is not correct, the entire population is contributing. Should this be taken up in communication?”

The document noted that this phrase, although factually incorrect, “serves as an appeal to all those who have not been vaccinated to get vaccinated.”

It furthermore states that the minister of health “says it at press conference, presumably deliberately, cannot be corrected.”

During the fall and winter months of 2021 and early 2022, German politicians repeatedly used the term “pandemic of the unvaccinated” to blame those who refused the experimental COVID jabs for “the pandemic” and all COVID-related measures. The government also used this line of reasoning to ban the unjabbed from participating in many parts of society, including having certain jobs, attending restaurants, shopping at stores, and many other areas.

Epoch Times Deutsch said that during this time, the unvaxxed faced “a level of exclusionary pressure that is unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

During the press conference held by the team around the journalist Aya Velázquez, Professor Stefan Homburg said an entry in the documents from March 19, 2021, showed that the RKI already knew that the AstraZeneca COVID shot had caused several cases of sinus vein thrombosis, barely 11 weeks into the “vaccination” campaign.

Homburg is an emeritus professor of economics who was the head of the public finance department of the Leibniz University in Hannover and who became one of the most well-known and formidable critics of the COVID tyranny in Germany.

Homburg furthermore said that the RKI files showed that the RKI and the Paul Ehrlich Institut (PEI) deliberately gave false testimony in court, for instance, in regard to protecting German soldiers against transmission of the virus. “In this respect, they could now be charged in court for unsworn testimony with reference to these minutes,” said Homburg.

According to the available data, Homburg said that the overall situation can be described as a “deception of the public.”

He told the Epoch Times that “the authorities deliberately deceived the public for years at the behest of politicians.”

Journalist Bastian Barucker told the Epoch Times that the documents showed that when Health Minister Jens Spahn announced school closures in November 2021, the RKI “had long known that this was not correct.”

In parts of the RKI files that were already released in March, the minutes of a meeting from January 11, 2023, show that the RKI knew that lockdowns cause more harm than good. “The consequences of the lockdown are sometimes more severe than Covid itself,” the document stated.

At the conclusion of the press conference, Velázquez said, “The RKI protocols prove it: Our corona policy was not based on rational, scientific considerations.”

“Numerous political decisions, such as 2G [full participation in society only given to vaxxed or recovered individuals], the facility-based and planned general vaccination mandate, or the vaccination of children, were purely political decisions for which the RKI, as an authority bound by instructions, provided an alleged scientific legitimation,” the journalist said

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Brownstone Institute

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By IAN MILLER

By late 2020, the media and public health establishment had two obsessions. One of their obsessions involved forcing the public to wear masks, even though the mountains of data and several studies had already confirmed that they don’t stop the transmission of respiratory viruses. The second obsession was forcing everyone to take Covid vaccines, regardless of their actual efficacy, risk of side effects, age or underlying health, or the vaccines’ rapidly waning efficacy.

Neither of those obsessions has abated, though even the most extreme, hardened Covid extremists have acknowledged that the vaccines were flawed, mandates were a mistake, and side effects should be acknowledged.

The media, unwilling to give up on the increased power, influence, and moral judgment it gained during the pandemic, has refused to accept that it effectively ended years ago.

So it’s no surprise that media outlets have noticed that, as we’ve seen every single summer since 2020, cases have increased, predominantly across the Western and Southern United States. Thankfully though, Los Angeles media, of course it had to be Los Angeles, has determined the culprit.

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

Turns out it’s not seasonality causing the increase, it’s outdated Covid vaccines and a lack of public masking, of course!

NBC Los Angeles “reported” that Covid cases in California and Los Angeles have “doubled” in the last month. This sounds horrifying and scary, doesn’t it? Yet it again, as is so often the case with Covid coverage, is misleading.

Let’s take a look at the current daily average of new cases in Los Angeles County:

Cases are so low they’re functionally indistinguishable from zero.

You can see why the media is scared, given how dramatic this surge appears to be compared to those in the previous four years. And thanks to NBC’s crack reporting and expert analysis, we know why this terrifying increase is happening. Spoiler alert: it’s all your fault that you haven’t controlled an uncontrollable respiratory virus with individual behavior that has no impact whatsoever on the spread of the coronavirus.

“People aren’t necessarily wearing masks; they’re not required to in certain places,” nurse practitioner Alice Benjamin, referenced as an expert by NBA LA said. “We’re traveling, we’re getting out for the summer. We also do have some reduced immunity. The vaccines will wane over time.”

Nowhere in the story is it mentioned that the massive jump in Covid cases in late 2021 and early 2022 happened immediately after LA County Public Health issued a press release celebrating the county for achieving 95+ percent masking rates at indoor businesses. No one seems willing or able to ask this nurse practitioner why she believes wearing masks would reduce this “surge,” if it failed so spectacularly in previous surges.

Endless Misinformation from ‘Experts’

She wasn’t done with the misinformation though. Benjamin warned that not enough Angelenos are getting the “updated” vaccine, which explains the summer increase.

“If you got it in October and later, that’s generally the updated vaccine,” Benjamin said. “If you got it prior to October, double check because if you did get the bivalent which has not been phased out, we recommend you do get an updated vaccine.”

And according to her, everyone should get it. Because the CDC said so.

“Per CDC recommendations, anyone 6 months or older should have at least one of the updated Covid vaccines,” Benjamin said.

Though, of course, no one on the crack NBC Los Angeles team thought to ask Benjamin why the “updated” October vaccine would help against the now common FLiRT variant when it emerged six months after the “updated” vaccine was released. Especially when the “study” process for booster doses is effectively nonexistent anyway. Pfizer and Moderna churn out a “targeted” dose that is supposed to protect against a variant that’s no longer circulating, never has to show any real-world benefit, and the regulatory agencies sign off on it, while the CDC recommends everyone get it.

Rinse, repeat.

Nor did anyone ask her what possible rationale there could be for forcing six-month-old babies to get vaccinated with a booster that has no studied efficacy against the currently circulating variant.

Her comments and the media reaction exemplify the problems with Covid discourse that started in 2020 and will apparently continue forever. A complete and purposeful ignorance of the facts, the data, and the evidence base. A willingness to advocate for the same sort of restrictions and interventions that have already failed. Ignorance of the booster process and endless appeals to public health authorities. Even though those authorities have made countless mistakes and refused to update their findings after being proven wrong.

The obvious question is: How does this type of absurdist discourse ever end? The answer, as we continue to see, is it doesn’t.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Ian Miller is the author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.” His work has been featured on national television broadcasts, national and international news publications and referenced in multiple best selling books covering the pandemic. He writes a Substack newsletter, also titled “Unmasked.”

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