News reports from around the world are coming in at a rapid pace detailing the move away from COVID mandates. From Austria’s decision to drop vaccine mandates, to San Francisco abandoning vaccine mandates for bars and restaurants, to the Senate voting to roll back Biden’s vaccine mandate for health care workers, the world seems to be increasingly done with the idea of compulsory shots.
It’s not difficult to understand why. Protests, such as the highly-publicized Canadian trucker convoy, certainly played a role, but new information from Pfizer recently released listing a formidable number of possible side effects had people wondering online exactly what they put in their bodies or expressing relief they held out and never got the jab.
Couple that with the fact that Pfizer has been operating behind a “strict veil of secrecy” in regard to their contracts with countries, and recent -- potentially exaggerated -- claims related to a Swiss study that mRNA technology might have some serious unintended consequences at the molecular level, and the vaccines start to look a whole lot more risky than the virus itself.
So why would the U.S. government do something as monumentally self-defeating as pay media companies (or bribe, as this report characterizes it) to help advertise relatively untested vaccines (via TheBlaze)?
The United States Department of Health and Human Service revealed that it purchased advertising from major news networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as cable TV news stations Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, legacy media publications including the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, digital media companies like BuzzFeed News and Newsmax, and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations. Chris Pandolfo, News Writer and Editor at TheBlaze, reported that these outlets were "collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that was nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety."
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The consequence of that – at least for government and possibly for media down the road – is a populace that has lost a great deal of faith in government’s abilities to provide health care advice and services.
Polling last summer showed that many Americans have lost faith in the CDC. Only 32 percent of respondents in an August Gallup poll said they believed the CDC was communicating a clear path to prevent COVID infection. Pew data from January showed 60 percent of respondents found CDC recommendations confusing.
While the CDC was losing credibility, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s watchdog, was quietly investigating the agency’s handling of the COVID crisis. On Jan. 27, the GAO delivered a rare “high risk” rating to the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically citing the CDC’s poor data management and ineffective messaging. These findings added fuel to congressional proposals to set up an independent COVID commission to examine the CDC’s performance.
What does the Biden administration do in response to a public that has lost faith in government and their role in public health? He proposes billions of new dollars for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), doubling the agency’s budget at the same time the country would like to forget they exist.
As a leader of the party that insists it represents “the science,” Biden is doing very little to increase the public’s faith in it.
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