There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
The White House is seeking to right the wrongs of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The website COVID.gov, launched by the U.S. federal government under the previous Trump administration, was originally a page dedicated to providing COVID-19 information and resources.
Its primary purpose was to provide the public with access to tools and guidance related to COVID-19 prevention, testing, treatment, and updates.
However, the website has now been converted into a page exposing the countless crimes that took place during the pandemic.
The first point of order is “The True Origins of Covid-19,” which details how the virus actually escaped from the Wuhan Lab as part of gain-of-function research.
The website states:
The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” publication — which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory — was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature.
A lab-related incident involving gain-of-function research is the most likely the origin of COVID-19. Current government mechanisms for overseeing this dangerous gain-of-function research are incomplete, severely convoluted, and lack global applicability.
The page goes on to explain the damage done by Democratic-led policies, particularly mask mandates, lockdowns, and social distancing:
The “6 feet apart” social distancing recommendation — which shut down schools and small business across the country — was arbitrary and not based on science. During closed door testimony, Dr. Fauci testified that the guidance “sort of just appeared.”
There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19. Public health officials flipped-flopped on the efficacy of masks without providing Americans scientific data — causing a massive uptick in public distrust.
Prolonged lockdowns caused immeasurable harm to not only the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans, with a particularly negative effect on younger citizens.
Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable populations, federal and state government policies forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life.
Unfortunately, the page does not make reference to the dodgy COVID-19 vaccines.
While the public were promised that the jabs would be “safe and effective,” they actually did not prevent transmission of the disease and often led to serious or even fatal side effects.
The website concludes with a reference to the industrial scale censorship that took place throughout the pandemic,
Public health officials often mislead the American people through conflicting messaging, knee-jerk reactions, and a lack of transparency.
Most egregiously, the federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored narratives, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions.
When those efforts failed, the Biden Administration resorted to “outright censorship—coercing and colluding with the world’s largest social media companies to censor all COVID-19-related dissent.”
Content for the page was sourced from the House Oversight Committee website, a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Hong Kong healthcare workers testing residents for COVID-19 (Credit: Studio Incendo)
This article is the second part of my Gateway Pundit article from January 15, Congressional Report Validates COVID Alleged “Conspiracy Theories” (Part 1), which concluded that the most likely origin of the COVID virus is the Wuhan lab.
Furthermore, it revealed that the federal government funded gain-of-function research and that Fauci not only knew about it but actively suppressed information to keep it hidden from the public.
This article will highlight the reality of coordinated censorship of opposing views, the ineffectiveness of vaccines in stopping the spread of the disease, and the lack of scientific support for mandates, which ultimately caused more harm than good—along with other measures such as lockdowns and school closures.
According to the congressional report, President Trump’s travel restrictions, implemented rapidly during the pandemic, saved lives and were supported by Dr. Fauci, contradicting the narrative that these measures were xenophobic.
However, public health officials frequently spread misinformation through conflicting messages and a lack of transparency, with the federal government unjustly demonizing off-label drug use and the lab leak theory.
The Biden Administration employed undemocratic methods, including pressuring social media companies to censor COVID-19 content it deemed misinformation.
While Operation Warp Speed successfully accelerated the development of the COVID-19 vaccine and saved millions of lives, the vaccine did not prevent the spread or transmission of the virus, as promised.
The FDA rushed vaccine approval to meet the Biden Administration’s mandate timeline, ignoring warnings from senior scientists about potential adverse effects.
Vaccine mandates, unsupported by science, caused harm by undermining individual freedoms, harming military readiness, and ignoring natural immunity from prior infections.
Furthermore, vaccine injury reporting systems created confusion and eroded public trust, while the government failed to efficiently and transparently adjudicate claims for those injured by the vaccine.
Other measures taken by the government, supported by Dr. Fauci, had widespread negative economic impacts on individuals, communities, businesses, healthcare providers, and local governments.
Mandatory lockdowns led to over 160,000 business closures, 60% of which were permanent, while supply chain disruptions worsened disparities for businesses that remained operational.
The healthcare system suffered from reduced quality of care, longer wait times, and missed diagnoses.
Unemployment rates soared to Great Depression-era levels, with low-wage sectors hit hardest by broad mitigation measures like the now-debunked “6 feet apart” guidance.
While the Federal Reserve’s swift actions helped prevent a severe economic downturn, its aggressive approach also fueled soaring inflation.
Prolonged COVID-19 school closures, which lacked scientific justification, caused significant societal harm.
Children, who were unlikely to contribute to the virus’s spread or face severe illness, suffered historic learning loss, increased psychological distress, and decreased physical well-being.
The Biden Administration’s CDC allowed political influence from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which edited school reopening guidance to include measures that prolonged closures unnecessarily.
AFT, a political union rather than a scientific organization, advocated for mitigation efforts like automatic closure triggers, further delaying reopenings. Testimony revealed AFT President Randi Weingarten had direct access to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.
The long-term effects include decades of academic progress lost, mental health crises, and a 51% increase in suicide attempts among girls aged 12-17.
A CATO Institute report similarly highlighted that the long-term closure of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant harm to children academically, mentally, and physically, with little to no impact on reducing virus transmission or child mortality.
These closures were driven more by politics than science, influenced by powerful teachers unions and their ties to Democratic politicians.
Research from Michigan State University found that decisions on in-person education in 2020 were tied more to local political partisanship and union strength than to COVID-19 severity, despite early evidence showing children were at low risk for severe illness.
Freedom of Information Act documents obtained by CATO confirmed the findings of the congressional report, namely that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) successfully lobbied the CDC to include union-driven language in school reopening guidance.
Studies further demonstrated the consequences: districts with in-person learning experienced less academic loss, and remote learning disproportionately harmed older, minority, and low-income students.
The fallout from these decisions has led many families to shift to homeschooling and private education, with homeschooling rates doubling post-pandemic.
Even mainstream media outlets that supported lockdowns and other pandemic measures are now acknowledging the lack of scientific backing behind some public health guidance and the damage done to public trust in government health authorities.
The New York Times reported that during congressional hearings, top NIH officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, admitted that key aspects of early COVID-19 guidance were not based on solid science.
Fauci revealed that the six-foot social distancing rule “just sort of appeared” without supporting studies and acknowledged the virus is airborne, contradicting initial claims that it spread primarily through droplets.
According to the New York Times, officials not only promoted questionable guidance but also suppressed dissenting views, with some actively deleting emails to avoid public scrutiny.
Dr. David Morens of the NIH admitted to using his personal account to bypass oversight, writing that they avoided “smoking guns” and deleted sensitive emails.
This lack of transparency and accountability led to poor decision-making, such as closing beaches and parks unnecessarily, delaying school reopenings, and wasting millions on ineffective plexiglass barriers.
These failures, driven by obstinacy and arrogance, had significant negative impacts on Americans’ lives and undermined trust in public health leadership.
Over the past year, several diseases have been highlighted in news reports as potential sources of the next pandemic. Notably, the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified pathogens such as Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, and various coronaviruses as having significant pandemic potential.
Additionally, the emergence of a new, more virulent strain of the mpox virus (formerly known as monkeypox) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has raised concerns among health experts. Despite these concerns, none of these diseases have escalated to a global pandemic over the past year.
Because of the many lies and invasive rights violations during COVID, many people have lost trust in the NIH and CDC. The constant identification of “the next great” pandemic is increasingly falling on deaf ears. With each new cause for panic, skeptics claim victory as the previous one fails to materialize.
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion 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.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
Faulty Premises
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance”, which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up,” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Uninformed Consent
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In August 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labelling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favour of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
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Dr Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of healthcare around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.