HHS spent $911M on COVID vaccine messaging, ‘consistently overstated’ virus risk to kids, damning House report finds
by Josh Christenson, The New York Post.com, October 23, 2024
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spent $911 million of taxpayer money on a massive COVID-19 vaccination promotion campaign that lied about masking, vaccines and boosters — and “consistently overstated” the risk of the virus to children, according to a shocking House committee report.
The GOP-led House Energy and Commerce panel released a scathing, 113-page document Wednesday about the most significant public health missteps, fibs and cover-ups from HHS and its subagency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“CDC’s guidance, which the Campaign relied on, went beyond the terms of FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to state, without evidence, that COVID vaccines were highly effective against transmission,” the report states. “This ultimately had a negative impact on vaccine confidence and the CDC’s credibility when proven untrue.”
It also states that the CDC “had inconsistent and flawed messaging about the effectiveness of masks,” “consistently overstated the risk of COVID-19 to children” and still “continues to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for all Americans ages six months and older, which has made the United States a global outlier in COVID-19 policy.”
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HHS shelled out $911,174,285 to the behavior change research and strategy firm Fors Marsh for the multimedia advertising campaign between August 2020 and June 2023.
That’s 20 times more than the $45 million spent on an ad campaign by the National Institutes of Health to promote its National Cancer Institute in 2012 — and roughly 40 times the whole communications budget that same year for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The “We Can Do This” campaign kicked off as the final stages of Operation Warp Speed vaccine trials wound down — and then-Democratic vice presidential nominee and California Sen. Kamala Harris sowed doubt about their efficacy.
“I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump, and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about,” she told CNN of Operation Warp Speed in September 2020. “I will not take his word for it.”
Nevertheless, Harris and President Biden’s administration went on to spread unreliable information about “vaccine uptake, masking, social distancing and booster vaccine uptake,” much of which was based on CDC guidance.
As the House panel probed the campaign, the CDC began to “edit and erase” many of the video ads from its YouTube channel, the report noted.
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None remain available to the public — and most used scaremongering to browbeat the unvaccinated into believing that taking the shot was the only way to return to pre-pandemic norms.
“Say yes. Say yes to seeing friends. Yes to hanging out. Yes to vacations. Yes to sleepovers. After a year of saying no, imagine how good yes is going to feel. Everyone 12 and older is now eligible for COVID vaccines,” a June 16, 2021, ad script read.
“Get a COVID vaccine. Party like it’s 2019,” a June 22, 2021, ad also promised while showing footage of a nightclub.
“The Delta wave that we’re seeing now, people are younger and sicker, and we’re intubating and losing people that are my age and younger,” said a visibly rattled nurse in another October 2021 ad. “People with kids that are my kids’ age that are never gonna see their kids graduate. They’re never gonna meet their grandkids and then to know that they could have gotten vaccinated, and it could have made a difference.”
The campaign also tapped social media influencers, whose videos remain up, and made use of health professionals who toed the party line in an effort to reach the so-called “movable middle” of vaccine-hesitant Americans.
“I will continue to listen to the health professionals in my life and I will continue … believing in science because it’s brought us so many good things,” one of many vlogs boosted by the campaign declared.
Fors Marsh’s internal surveys, however, found that by March 2022, between 60% and 76% of parents with unvaccinated kids younger than 18 had concerns about side effects that were not sufficiently answered.
Through several “Ask a Doctor” sessions, the campaign also parroted CDC recommendations — that did not align with published scientific studies — to urge vaccination and continued booster shots.
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Even after a majority of the US population had gotten vaccinated by June 2022, the campaign was pushing for children as young as 6 months old to be given the jab.
“It doesn’t really matter if your child’s completely healthy, because some children will have the sniffles, maybe signs like the flu; fever, runny nose, or body aches. But others will end up in the hospital and end up there for a long time,” another ad from the campaign threatened.
Then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky overruled her agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in September 2021 and unilaterally approved booster shots without their input. Two senior advisers on the committee resigned the same month.
Walensky would also later cave to pressure from powerful unions like the American Federation of Teachers to keep schools closed to in-person learning in early 2021.
The US was an outlier in pushing for child vaccinations, as other industrialized nations like the UK, France, Germany, Australia and Japan did not recommend COVID shots except for those with pre-existing conditions.
The FDA had also issued emergency use authorizations for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID vaccines back in December 2020 despite no clinical data showing the length of their efficacy or whether they blocked viral transmission from person to person.
At the time of Walensky’s booster decision, studies were already showing that COVID posed virtually no risk to children and the virus was not spreading at higher rates in classrooms.
The then-CDC chief had already made erroneous assertions about the vaccines in high-profile media interviews and congressional testimony, going beyond even the manufacturers and the FDA’s assessment to claim COVID-19 transmissibility was reduced after vaccination.
“Data have emerged again, that have demonstrated, even if you were to get infected during post-vaccination, that you cannot give it to anyone else,” Walensky told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee in a May 2021 hearing.
“CDC personnel should — and must — have known that, historically, vaccines inoculating against respiratory viruses are seldom 100[%] effective at stopping transmission, largely due to viral mutation,” the House report notes.
