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 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 Blaze, which found a number of major media outlets were paid to promote the Covid vaccine. Such venues included the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NBC, CNN, Fox News and several others. Blaze’s report received little coverage – even in conservative media (perhaps because some of those outlets were also paid by HHS) ideologically predisposed to criticise government-fuelled narratives on the pandemic. As Blaze reports:
Hundreds of news organisations were paid by the federal Government to advertise for the vaccines as part of a “comprehensive media campaign,” according to documents the Blaze 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 roll-out, the Biden administration made a number of efforts to bolster vaccination rates. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s 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 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’s 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 randomised 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 hospitalisation 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 one 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’s 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”
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:
Washington Post: Joe Rogan is using his wildly popular podcast to question vaccines. Experts are fighting back.
Atlantic: Joe 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 rhapsodise 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 roll-out 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.
This article was first published on Rav’s Substack page. Subscribe here.
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Baroness Morgan……
…….just let that sink in – almost as risible as Baroness Bennett – the former Green leader who gives new meaning to the word ‘mediocre’.
If in the last 20yrs we have not been presented with sufficient evidence to abolish the House of Lords, and say nothing and keep voting the same way – then I think we deserve everything that comes our way.
The left wing Establishment it only interested in women when it suits the agenda
Remeece – Choose Your Side (Official Music Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO3P7NeONVI
Upcoming events – don’t expect someone to fight this on your behalf
Friday 8th October 11am
Parade through Wokingham Town Centre with signs and strange masks like in Edinburgh
– please bring your carnival/Guy Fawkes/Fancy Dress masks and white overalls if you have them – if not please come anyway
Meet in the Cockpit Path car park in the centre of the town RG40 2HD
Stand in the Park Make friends – keep sane – talk freedom and have a laugh
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens RG40 2HD Sundays 10am
behind the Cockpit Path car park in the centre of the town
Bracknell South Hill Park
Sundays 10am & Wednesdays 2pm
Join our Telegram group http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Reading River Promenade Sundays 10am
Join our Telegram group https://t.me/standindparkreading
Abolishing the House of Lords is irrelevant in this context. Go and stand on a different orange box for that and concentrate on this Breast Screening
matter.
“My name is Boris Johnson, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.
He has done this with his followers through his policies and his behaviours, he will as he is doing try to blame business, employers, ordinary people. It his work and his work alone that has done this
There is a bit of a confusion here – between routine screening and the follow-up of individuals with symptoms.
It is an important distinction. Routine screening suffers from the same problems as the PCR testing of an asymptomatic population – false positives etc.
The situation is often examined as a case study in texts covering statistical fallacies.
Well yes sort of. The difference is that 1 in 7 women will still get breast cancer in the UK! Even if a mammogram is “positive” then these results are still confirmed for definite with a biopsy or MRI. So yes it increases anxiety for the women who are waiting but they still get a proper diagnosis and treatment (well unless chemo is halted for covvie). Unlike cov screening it’s also optional, plus you get all these scenarios and the likelihoods in advance so you can give proper informed consent!
PCR tests are all kinds of bollocks because we have no idea what the incidence of covid is, what the false positive and negative rates are, the ct count significance, whether it’s just picking up fragments of dead virus or reacting to other viruses etc. And if you have symptoms they don’t test for the other 200 viruses it might also be. Even if there was zero covid you’d still get some positives.
I tore up the screening form when I saw masks were mandatory.
Right on. I had to argue and fight to get into a hospital so they could look at my daughter’s arm, but they caved in eventually!
Your fault, not the system if you get breast cancer then. Sacrifice your principles, not your health.
Project Veritas interview what they claim are 3 Pfizer scientists. They don’t tell us anything we don’t already know but it’s nonetheless interesting to have it confirmed.
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/project-veritas-quot-pfizer-quot_Tzk7jJbghHdgVlw.html
Savage Jabby will probably just say “well these women obviously *couldn’t be bothered* to get checked up”
If they don’t like cancer, they can just get another disease.
When is it going to sink in that the effects of the govt lockdown and refusal of the WahNHS to perform proper medicine means the UKs medical services are an order of magnitude worse than any other 1st world country, despite the billions shovelled into the ever more demanding ” stretched NHS”
It is the very structure of the NHS that condemns Britons to 2nd world healthcare in perpetuity.
Why will no one ask why Brits are not allowed the level of healthcare available to Germans, Austrians, Swiss Dutch etc etc.
It is no good comparing the UK NHS with any other country. Comparisons throw up very strange anomalies. The NHS is staffed with tens of thousands of nurses who are not performing nursing tasks at all. My daughter is a Nursing Sister but is actually a pen pusher, not even being able to help out during covid because she had not conducted any nursing duties in ten years. She is still listed as a nurse. I used to be a soldier, but I am not classed as a soldier still. Too many nurses are specifically trained and cannot be used in any other nursing discipline. There are still general nursing staff, but not like in the days of SRNs and SENs. Any nurse in those days could be used just about anywhere.
“if it saves just one life”
I heard, today, of a church elder whose wife has gone from “well” to intensive care, with breast cancer, in the course of a few weeks. Something is rotten in the NHS.
It isn’t just women that this is affecting. I have had an experience over the weekend which suggests that GP’s, as soon as they hear the word cough, want nothing to do with you.
I developed a chest infection over the last week, which was affecting my breathing. I finally plucked up the courage on Friday to call for a GP’s appointment, and was told to present at the surgery at 1600, where I was kept waiting intil 1700.
A routine exam,blood oxygen, blood pressure, checked my chest and she started asking me questions. As soon as I mentioned that I had a cough, and was bringing up a lot off rubbish of my chest, instead off asking further, or looking to see, I was told to go and have a covid test. She wouldnt prescribe me anythihg for the symptoms I was describing, presumably because a cough equals covid and you become a statistic.
My health detriorated massively over the weekend, with massive side affects of severe dehyration, loss of bladder control, panic attacks, and I finally got to talk to the same GP yesterday afternoon. She was still not willing to prescribe antibitics, refusing to accept me description. Instead, she arranged for an appointment with a colleague, who did one of the most comprehensive exams I have ever had including asking second opionions of the hospital about the possibility of a Urinery Tract Infection. it took over 40 minutes. The question again came up of the cough, and I got the same you need to do a covid test, but this time I was armed with a sample of the crap I had been coughing up. It was enough to prescribe me antibiotics that I should have been prescribed last Friday instead of letting a massive infection invade my body for four days and cause massive side effects.
So if you go to the doctors and have cough, which you KNOW is not covid related, go prepared to push back with evidence, because your GP is not likely to accept your word for it.
Covid is more important than cancer. It’s also more important than heart disease, diabetes, stroke, dementure…
Correction. Covid is easier to make lots of money out of compared with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke and dementia.
Propaganda fed muppet. It is not. Or are you being sarcastic?
He’s being sarcastic.
My wife is a Breast Screening Clinal Director, Consultant Radiologist at a Major Regional Hospital in England. In spite of the pause in screening at the beginning of the Pandemic 2020, When she returned to work, she got on with the job and caught up with her lists, and she has continued and been praised for her success. So, not all is doom and gloom. It is a case of the GPs doing their job and refering their symptomatic patients by seeing them and not doing telephone or video triage, the government and media stopping frightening women who need screening from attending their appointments, and Breast Screening staff pulling their finger out and getting on with doing the job. And don’t use Covid as an excuse in England because vaccinated staff no longer have to isolate if in contact with an alleged positive case. The Government and Hancock have a lot to answer for.
Strange, how they haven’t yet found a cure for cancer, or have they? German New Medicine ~
Sacred Medicine. https://youtu.be/45ffPalsA0Y