Dr. Weeks’ Comment: What did YOU learn from your government from 2020 to now? After lies and manipulation, now we have the light of truth. You were lied to and manipulated at the cost of health and lives and now we learn, at the cost of $20 million a month.
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From JEFF CHILDERS edition 10-26-024. Subscribe at coffeeandcovid@substack.com .
He reports:
This week, the House Oversight Committee released its long-awaited report on the government’s misuse of psychological manipulation during the pandemic. It’s ugly. The House report was titled, “We Can Do This: An Assessment of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Covid-19 Public Campaign.”
THE REPORT:
https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/We_Can_Do_This_NIH_PR_Campaign_Report_PUBLIC_82616d81eb.pdf
The report weighs in at a very-readable 70 pages. I recommend the whole thing. If you’re time-limited, skim the table of contents on the third page and just read the sections of most interest. For a quick overview of the whole thing, read this Twitter thread summarizing the report written by Stanford Professor and real public health expert Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
“The House report on HHS covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden admin spent almost a billion dollars to push falsehoods about covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.”
In fall 2020, the bureaucratic behemoth that is HHS was well along in swinging its monstrous apparatus of government over the heads of every citizen in the country. Instead of doing its own work, the government’s vast army of overpaid health bureaucrats outsourced critical public health communications to a “full-service behavior-change research” firm.
Not a science firm. Not a health firm. A “behavior-change research” firm. The firm’s name, which should become as much a hissing and a byword as the names “Mengele” or “Benedict Arnold,” is the Fors Marsh Group. (We will figure out the names of the involved individuals at FMG. I bet there is a lot more to this story.)
As the report’s introduction explains, for its “behavior change” services, HHS ultimately paid FMG over nine hundred million dollars. Stop and think about that for a second. The U.S. government paid nearly a billion dollars to one company to manipulate citizens into becoming more compliant to the government.
But … but … it was all meant for good, right? I mean, sure, we can quibble about the ethics of psychological manipulation and “nudging” and stuff, but those decisions were made during a pandemic, amidst a public health emergency, when lives were at stake. But the important thing is their hearts were in the right place. Right?
Maybe not. Maybe it was much simpler than it looks. What advanced techniques did FMG use to make the American public more compliant? What cutting-edge science did FORS bring to the HHS table, to earn their billion-dollar fee? Was it a blend of innovative AI and pioneering psychology?
Nope. They just lied. They lied, and they exaggerated stuff, to terrify people. Their lies were so bloody awful and so preposterous that nobody would have ever listened to them — except that they put the full weight and credit of the United States government behind their lies and fearmongering to make the whole grotesque scheme work. In doing so, they consumed every drop of historic trust earned by previous generations of hard-working public servants.
But … did they really lie? Yes. They lied. They lied like rugs, or dogs, or Joe Biden reminiscing about his Uncle Bosey. They lied tons of times. Lies like promising that vaccination would stop transmission of the virus dead in its tracks. That particular lie came from the CDC itself (i.e., the pits of hell) and sailed straight into the FMG’s advertising scripts.
“CDC’s guidance, which the Campaign relied upon, went beyonf the terms of FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to state, without evidence, that COVID vaccines were highly effective against transmission. This ultimately had a negative impact on vaccine confidence and the CDC’s credibility when proven untrue.”
FMG’s plan wasn’t innovative. It wasn’t cutting edge. A child could have done it. They’re morons. They just lied, and they leaned on Americans’ trust in government to sell their simplistic lies. And the bureaucrats running the health agencies and the country’s liberal health professionals all compliantly went right along with it all, facilitating the lies at every step.
Lies are unethical and Liars are bad people. Even, or especially, public health liars. FMG’s whole stupid program was unethical to the core.
It was also overhyped nonsense. For example, FMG’s initial proposal to HHS was founded on a single “theory” they called the “Health Belief Model.” Here’s how they dressed their so-called Health Belief Model up in fancy, academic-sounding language:
“The health belief model, used by the Campaign, posits that “a belief in a personal threat of an illness or disease together with a person’s belief in the effectiveness of the recommended health behavior or action will predict the likelihood the person will adopt the behavior.”
That’s not innovative, creative, cutting-edge, or even smart. All that Model says is, if you scare people by saying they’ll die, and don’t give them time to think, they’re likely to do whatever you say, especially if they already trust the person telling them what to do:
“Based on reports shared with the committee, FMG spent on average over 20 million per month for the design and execution of the campaign. In its proposal for the task order, the company asserted that it could benefit ASPA by using a strategic mix of paid and earned media with exclusive radio partnerships, research-based messaging, and reinforced messaging from trusted influencers, celebrities, and sports figures.”
Of course, afterwards, once they figure out they’ve been had, people won’t trust the “influencers, celebrities, and sports figures” anymore, but who cares? FMG will already be rich by then.
In other words, the plan was to coerce or bribe top government officials, doctors, pastors, priests, social media stars, bloggers, vloggers, Hollywood celebrities, singers, football players, and tennis stars into lying for them. The House report included the scripts FMG prepared for actors who pretended to be covid victims.
It was all completely fake and completely outrageous.
Worse, it’s not just the billion dollars FMG got. The real cost includes Americans’ lost trust in government. And the lost trust in public health. The lost trust in vaccines (well, that one might actually be a positive). The lost trust in experts. The spiked anxiety rates from the fear campaigns. The broken brains of germaphobes and medical fetishists. The cost to the children in lost educational attainment, depression, and who knows what kinds of future psychosis.
(We could continue, adding vaccine injuries, jobs lost to mandates, closed businesses, destroyed economies, inflation, and so on.)
This House report was a great start toward accountability. Having documents like this is important, because they can be cited as official findings. For example, a court is much more likely to seriously consider something from a House Oversight Report than something some lawyer says. We’re getting there.
Here again is the REPORT so you can read it for yourself.
THE REPORT:
https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/We_Can_Do_This_NIH_PR_Campaign_Report_PUBLIC_82616d81eb.pdf
B. Summary of Recommendations
Americans cannot afford another botched government response to a future pandemic. In order to prevent a recurrence of HHS’s failures in public relations management for the COVID-19 pandemic response and to strengthen the nation’s public health preparedness system, the Committee makes the following recommendations:
• Congress should consider formally authorizing the CDC and clearly define the agency’s core mission.
• HHS and its agencies should abide by the FDA’s product labeling guidelines. HHS and its agencies should be barred from promoting information regarding an FDA-regulated product that does not reflect the FDA-approved label.
• Congress should consider clarifying responsibility for evaluating the safety of vaccines and streamline existing reporting systems for capturing vaccine injuries and adverse reactions.
• HHS and its agencies should embrace a culture of transparency and accountability.
• HHS and public health officials should not attempt to silence dissenting scientific opinions.
• HHS and its agencies should overhaul their website archival process to mimic that of prior White House administrations.