There’s an entire field of research dedicated to developing messaging designed to persuade “vaccine-hesitant” individuals to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
None of the messaging examined by researchers involves conveying factual evidence that supports the claims — widely disseminated by Big Pharma, Big Media and public health agencies — that the vaccines are “safe” and “effective.”
Researchers last month published the results of a clinical trial involving two survey experiments on how to manufacture consent for COVID vaccines.
The Yale-sponsored study, “Persuasive messaging to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake intentions,” examined how different persuasive messages affected 1) intentions to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, 2) willingness to persuade friends and relatives to get the vaccine, 3) fear of those who have not been vaccinated, and 4) social judgment of people who choose not to vaccinate.
According to the study’s authors:
“Given the considerable amount of skepticism about the safety and efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine, it has become increasingly important to understand how public health communication can play a role in increasing COVID-19 vaccine uptake.”
The paper did not address the underlying reasons someone might have concerns about the safety or efficacy of COVID vaccines but focused instead exclusively on how to persuade them to get the vaccine.
From the paper:
“We conducted two pre-registered experiments to study how different persuasive messages affect intentions to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, willingness to persuade friends and relatives to receive one, and negative judgments of people who choose not to vaccinate.
“In the first experiment, we tested the efficacy of a large number of messages against an untreated control condition … In Experiment 2, we retested the most effective messages from Experiment 1 on a nationally representative sample of American adults.”
The messages tested by the researchers have been woven into mainstream media narratives and public health campaigns throughout the world. But the study completion date for part 1 was July 8, 2020, which means all of these messages were created prior to the release of any science to support them.
The baseline information control message states:
“To end the COVID-19 outbreak, it is important for people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 whenever a vaccine becomes available. Getting the COVID-19 vaccine means you are much less likely to get COVID-19 or spread it to others. Vaccines are safe and widely used to prevent diseases and vaccines are estimated to save millions of lives every year.”
In order to establish which messaging strategies elicited an inclination to get vaccinated, 10 additional messages were added to bring context to the baseline message.
These messages incorporated themes of self-interest, community interest, guilt, embarrassment, anger, bravery, trust in science, personal freedom, economic freedom and community economic benefit.
“We find that persuasive messaging that invokes prosocial vaccination and social image concerns is effective at increasing intended uptake and also the willingness to persuade others and judgments of non-vaccinators,” the researchers wrote.
To study the impacts of guilt, embarrassment and anger, researchers prompted people to think about how they would feel if they did not get vaccinated and then spread the virus to others.
“Emotions are thought to play a role in cooperation, either by motivating an individual to take an action because of a feeling that they experience or restraining them from taking an action because of the emotional response it would provoke in others.”
The “not brave” and “trust in sciences” messages were designed to evoke concerns about reputation and social image. The “not brave” message “reframed the idea that being unafraid of the virus is not a brave action, but instead selfish, and that the way to demonstrate bravery is by getting vaccinated because it shows strength and concern for others.”
The “trust in science” message suggested, “those who do not get vaccinated do not understand science and signal this ignorance to others.”
Personal freedom, economic freedom and community economic benefit messages drew on concerns linked to COVID restrictions.
Overall, it was a message that appealed to community interest, reciprocity and a sense of embarrassment that proved most persuasive, resulting in a 30% increase in intention to vaccinate, a 24% increase in willingness to advise a friend to get vaccinated and a 38% increase in negative opinions of people who decline the vaccines relative to the placebo message.
Community interest messages that incorporate embarrassment were determined to be most effective in getting people to encourage others to get the vaccine, while “not brave” messaging showed the most promise in creating negative judgments of non-vaccinators.
The Yale study findings are consistent with another recent paper, “Vaccination as a Social Contract,” which demonstrated people view vaccination as a social contract and are less willing to cooperate with those who refuse vaccination.
The study stated:
“The experiments consistently showed that especially compliant (i.e., vaccinated) individuals showed less generosity toward nonvaccinated individuals … It is concluded that vaccination is a social contract in which cooperation is the morally right choice.
“Individuals act upon the social contract, and more so the stronger they perceive it as a moral obligation. Emphasizing the social contract could be a promising intervention to increase vaccine uptake, prevent free riding, and, eventually, support the elimination of infectious diseases.”
Forget the facts, appeal to ‘values’
Saad Omer, one of the authors of the Yale study, has an extensive interest in public health messaging.
His efforts to combat vaccine hesitancy earned him a spot on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts working Group on COVID-19 Vaccines, the Sabine Vaccine Institute’s Board of Trustees and the WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety.
In 2020, Omer initiated a “Building Vaccine Confidence Through Tailored Messaging Campaigns” project involving randomized trials in five countries using social media messaging to increase COVID and childhood vaccine coverage.
In his keynote address at the first WHO Global Infodemiology Conference in June 2020, Omer referenced “moral foundation theory” and suggested appealing to values could change decision-making behaviors.
Omer provided details about a messaging study for the HPV vaccine and discussed how similar strategies could be applied to create compliance for COVID measures:
“We wanted to test out, can we have a purity-based message? So we showed them pictures of genital warts and described a vignette, a narrative, a story, talking about how someone got genital warts and how disgusting they were and how pure vaccines are that sort of restore the sanctity of the body.
“So we just analyzed these data. This was a randomized control trial with apriori outcomes. We found approximately 20 percentage point effect on people’s likelihood of getting an HPV vaccine in the next 6 months …
“We are trying out liberty-based messages or liberty-mediated messaging around this behavior related to COVID-19 outbreak. That wearing a mask or taking precautions eventually make you free, regain your autonomy. Because if the disease rates are low, your activities can resume.”
The ‘science’ of infodemiology, infoveillance and infodemic
Omer is one of many prominent voices in what is known as the field of “infodemiology,” a term coined in 2002 by Dr. Gunter Eysenbach.
As the first infodemiologist and founder of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, Eysenbach defines infodemiology as ”the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the Internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy.”
Eysenbach also coined the terms “infoveillance,” defined as “a type of syndromic surveillance that specifically utilizes information found online,” and “infodemic,” which refers to “an overabundance of information” that generally includes deliberate attempts to disseminate wrong information to undermine the public health response and advance alternative agendas of groups or individuals.”
Using just three words, Eysenbach created a scientific niche, identified a problem and proposed at least part of a so-called solution.
The WHO readily embraced this language during the pandemic. An editorial in the August 2020 issue of The Lancet began with a quote from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: “We’re not just fighting a pandemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.”
The WHO hosted several infodemiology conferences throughout the pandemic. Asserting that “misinformation costs lives,” the WHO, the United Nations and other groups created the perfect justification for social media surveillance and the suppression of dissent.
In 2020, the WHO created a resolution asking member states to take measures to leverage digital technologies to counter “misinformation” and “disinformation” and worked with more than 50 digital companies and social media platforms, including TikTok and even Tinder, to support these efforts.
The efforts to eliminate “misinformation” resulted in unprecedented censorship of virtually anything that steps outside of state-sanctioned consensus and the creation of a captive audience primed to accept a singular narrative.
A National Defense Authorization Act amendment in 2012 that legalized the use of propaganda on the American public makes it easier for governments to create self-serving narratives.
And thanks to a multi-billion dollar budget from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), we are under the influence of the best messages money can buy — whether or not those messages are true.
This is likely why the CDC, public health departments and mainstream media can make broad assertions like this: “COVID-19 vaccines were developed quickly while maintaining the highest safety standard possible,” and this: “Hydroxychloroquine shouldn’t be used to treat COVID-19,” and claim they are “fact.”
Articles and posts that challenge those assertions are regularly removed if they’re even permitted to be published in the first place.
Public health compliance: A cottage industry
Yale is not the only university researching the science of compliance. Academic institutions and government agencies throughout the world are immersed in this emerging behavioral science.
In February 2021, the University of Pennsylvania newsletter, Penn Today, published, “When the Message Matters, Use Science to Craft It,” covering behavioral scientist Jessica Fishman’s Message Effects Lab (MEL) initiative and research related to “what sways decision-making,” particularly with regard to COVID vaccination and testing.
MEL currently has partnerships and ongoing projects with the World Bank, the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, Penn Medicine, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Independence Blue Cross/Blue Shield and the Government of Canada to address health-related behaviors.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a branch of HHS, also sponsored research to explore influences on COVID vaccine decision-making. The study, “Attitudes Toward a Potential SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine: A Survey of U.S. Adults,” concluded:
“We found that a substantial proportion (42.2%) of participants in a national survey conducted during the coronavirus pandemic would be hesitant to accept vaccination against COVID-19. Black race was one of the strongest independent predictors of not accepting vaccination; this is especially alarming, given the outsized impact of COVID-19 among African-Americans.
“Our findings suggest that many of the individuals who responded ‘not sure’ may accept vaccination if given credible information that the vaccine is safe and effective. As vaccine development proceeds at an unprecedented pace, parallel efforts to proactively develop messages to foster vaccine acceptance are needed to achieve control of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Behavioral scientist Dr. Rupali Limaye took the messaging a step further. She teaches a free online training course, offered by Johns Hopkins University, that “prepares parents of school-age children, PTAs, community members and school staff to be Vaccine Ambassadors and promote vaccine acceptance in their communities.”
Limaye will be a panelist for an interactive webinar “Making COVID-19 vaccines APPEALing: Pilot message testing in India,” later this month.
Changing messages, same goals
While government agencies and the scientific community cling to unsupported beliefs about vaccine safety and efficacy, they appear to recognize the importance of constantly revisiting their understanding of the impacts of messaging.
UPenn’s updated research found intentions around vaccination have changed. The university’s Annenberg School for Communication reported:
“The researchers found that trust in scientific institutions and health authorities was central to individuals’ intentions to be vaccinated, especially in the early part of the pandemic. However, as the pandemic continued, other factors related to trust emerged …
“The evidence, the researchers wrote, ‘documents the need for the public health community to redouble its efforts to preemptively and persistently communicate not only about how vaccines in general work but also about their benefits, safety, and effectiveness.’”
Research from Civics Analytics, a technology company that creates data-driven audience campaigns, seconds the notion that effective messaging must evolve.
With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the company explored COVID concerns among different demographics and determined that a “one-size-fits-all” message would not work. The company said:
“In the spring of 2021, before the Delta variant emerged in the U.S. and when vaccine mandates had not yet been implemented, we found that messages highlighting experiences that are off-limits to unvaccinated individuals (such as concerts or international travel) or emphasizing personal choice were most persuasive…
“As you’ll see in this research, the most persuasive messages have changed.”
According to Civics Analytics, FOMO (fear of missing out) and “personal decision” messages were the most impactful. But more current data indicates the “protecting children” message has become more effective at persuading people to get vaccinated.
From the study:
“For general messaging targeting all unvaccinated people, focus on protecting children from COVID-19 and on the financial ramifications of contracting the virus.”
The company found “vaccine safety,” “scary COVID statistics” and “personal story” messages were inclined to backfire and could decrease the likelihood of vaccinating.
Perhaps some good scientists will advance the learning curve and study what happens when the public discovers that “proven messages” lack supporting scientific data.
©2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
February 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, HHS, Johns Hopkins University, United States |
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Two members of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform want the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to produce the transcript of a conference call between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins during which the two discussed possible origins of COVID-19.
In a letter this week to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote:
“It was on this conference call that Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and, further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.”
Reps. Comer and Jordan also wrote that despite Fauci’s claims to the contrary, he knew the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain of function research in Wuhan through a grant to Eco-Health Alliance.
“It is unclear if Dr. Fauci reported any of these issues to his superiors,” Comer and Jordan wrote. “We need to know the entirety of what Dr. Fauci knew and when he knew it.”
The letter followed the release of emails revealing Fauci may have withheld information pointing to the possibility that the SARS Co-V-2 virus originated in the lab in Wuhan, China.
The Congressmen gave HHS until Jan. 18 to respond to questions put forth in the letter, including:
- Did Drs. Fauci or Collins warn anyone at the White House about the potential COVID-19 originated in a lab and could be intentionally genetically manipulated?
- If these concerns were not shared, why was the decision to keep them quiet made?
- What new evidence, if any, came to light about COVID-19 between Feb. 1, 2020, and Feb. 4, 2020, to alter the belief it originated in a lab?
- Did Drs. Fauci or Collins edit the Nature Medicine paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”?
- Would having this knowledge earlier have benefitted either vaccine or treatment development?
- By February 1, 2020, were Drs. Fauci or Collins aware of the State Department’s warnings about Wuhan Institute of Virology safety?
- Would this warning have changed the early response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
The letter concluded:
“By continuing to refuse to cooperate with our request, your agencies are choosing to hide information that will help inform the origins of the ongoing pandemic, prevent future pandemics, respond to future pandemics, inform the United States’ current national security posture, and restore confidence in our public health experts. HHS and NIH’s continued obstruction is likely to cause irreparable harm to the credibility of these agencies.”
Children’s Health Defense in September called for an investigation into Fauci’s role in gain-of-function research.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
January 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, Francis Collins, HHS, NIH, United States |
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You must take this product. You cannot sue if injured. You can maybe see the clinical trial safety data in 75+ years. And the deidentified post-licensure safety data – no, you cannot see that either.
Three prior posts explained how the FDA seeks to delay for 75+ years full production of Pfizer’s pre-licensure safety data. While we have that fight, we submitted a request to the CDC, on behalf of ICAN, for the deidentified post-licensure safety data for the Covid-19 vaccines in the CDC’s v-safe system. Even though this data is available in deidentified form (meaning, it includes no personal health information), the CDC refused to produce this data claiming it is not deidentified.
So, on behalf of ICAN, we filed a federal lawsuit against the CDC and its parent entity, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to force the CDC to produce this data to the public. The CDC should have no issue doing so because it has already made this data available to a private company – Oracle – in deidentified form. It is telling that Larry Ellison’s company can see the data American taxpayers paid the CDC to collect but the average American and independent scientists cannot?!
What is the v-safe system you may ask? Since rolling out the Covid-19 vaccines, the FDA and CDC have stated that their primary safety monitoring system, VAERS, is unreliable. The CDC therefore deployed a new safety monitoring system for COVID-19 vaccines called “v-safe.” V-safe is a smartphone app that allows vaccine recipients to “tell CDC about any side effects after getting the COVID-19 vaccine.” The purpose of the app “is to rapidly characterize the safety profile of COVID-19 vaccines when given outside a clinical trial setting.” With this new system, the CDC claims that these “vaccines are being administered under the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history.”
That all sounds great. And a CDC document explains that data submitted to v-safe is “collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle,” a private computer technology company, and that Oracle can access “aggregate deidentified data for reporting.” This means data submitted to v-safe is already available in deidentified form and could be immediately released to the public.
But yet, after we submitted a FOIA request to the CDC, on behalf of ICAN, to produce the deidentified v-safe data, the CDC acknowledged that “v-safe data contains approximately 119 million medical entries” but refused to produce that data by claiming that the “information in the app is not de-identified.” The CDC had apparently not read its own documentation regarding v-safe. But we had. So, we appealed this decision and submitted another request to the CDC that expressly asked only for any deidentified v-safe data, in the app or otherwise. Meaning, in the form that the CDC made the data available to Oracle. Incredibly, the CDC administratively closed this request stating it was duplicative of the original request.
Let me break that down again. The first request was denied by the CDC because it claimed the request sought data in the app that was deidentified. But then the CDC closed the second request, which made clear it is seeking only deidentified data (in the app or otherwise), by claiming the second request was duplicative of the first request! If this sounds ridiculous, it is because it is.
The public should be outraged by the CDC’s games.
The introduction to the lawsuit is copied below with a link to the entire complaint at the end. As with the pre-licensure Pfizer data, if you find what you are reading difficult to believe, that is because it is dystopian for the government to give pharmaceutical companies billions, mandate Americans to take their products, prohibit Americans from suing for harms, yet refuse to let Americans see the pre- and post-licensure safety data for these products. The lesson yet again is that civil and individual rights should never be contingent upon a medical procedure.
INTRODUCTION TO LAWSUIT AGAINST CDC FOR V-SAFE DATA
1. Between December 2020 and February 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) issued Emergency Use Authorizations for three COVID-19 vaccines, one of which subsequently received FDA approval in August 2021. While the FDA approved these vaccines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), is charged with monitoring the safety of all vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccines approved by the FDA. The CDC claims that these “COVID-19 vaccines are being administered under the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history[.]”
2. The federal government has mandated that millions of Americans receive these vaccine products. HHS has also given pharmaceutical companies complete immunity for injuries caused by those products. Mandating that millions of Americans inject a product for which they cannot hold the manufacturer liable if the product injures them demands complete transparency, especially when it comes to releasing the data underlying the product’s safety. FOIA exists precisely so that the American people can obtain transparency and, in this case, obtain the data which supports the CDC’s claims to intensive safety monitoring.
3. As for the pre-licensure data submitted by the pharmaceutical companies, the FDA took the position in another FOIA action that, because it needs to deidentify that data, it needs at least 75 years to produce the data to the public. As for the post-licensure data, the FDA and CDC have said that their prior primary existing safety monitoring program was incapable of determining causation and were otherwise unreliable. The CDC has, however, deployed a new safety monitoring system for the COVID-19 vaccines, v-safe, and the data within v-safe is already available in deidentified form and could be forthwith released to the public.
4. V-safe is a smartphone app that allows vaccine recipients to “tell CDC about any side effects after getting the COVID-19 vaccine.” The purpose of the app “is to rapidly characterize the safety profile of COVID-19 vaccines when given outside a clinical trial setting and to detect and evaluate clinically important adverse events and safety issues that might impact policy or regulatory decisions.”
5. Data submitted to v-safe is “collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle,” a private computer technology company. Although the CDC has “access to the individualized survey data,” Oracle can only access “aggregate deidentified data for reporting.”
6. Plaintiff asked through its instant FOIA requests that the CDC produce the deidentified data from the v-safe program in the same form that Oracle can access. Plaintiff believes that to assure transparency regarding the government’s claim that COVID-19 vaccines are “safe and effective,” the public should have immediate access to all v-safe data, in deidentified form, and therefore, once the CDC produces that data, Plaintiff intends to make it publicly available. Despite the fact that the deidentified data already exists, it is already in the hands of a private company, and the CDC has never objected to its production, the CDC has so far failed to produce it to Plaintiff or to the American public. The federal government is thereby not only failing to provide the transparency necessary to earn the American people’s trust regarding these vaccines but is also failing to comply with FOIA.
7. Plaintiff Informed Consent Action Network (“Plaintiff”) is a non-profit organization that advocates for informed consent and full transparency and disseminates information necessary for same with regard to all medical interventions. It intends to make all v-safe data immediately available to the public so that independent scientists can immediately analyze that data. It believes that we need all hands on deck, both inside and outside the government, to address serious and ongoing issues with the vaccine program, including waning immunity, adverse reactions, etc. Locking out independent scientists from addressing these issues is dangerous, irresponsible, unethical, and illegal.
8. To acquire the v-safe data, Plaintiff made three requests to the CDC pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552, as amended) (“FOIA”) seeking information regarding v-safe.
….
You can read the entire complaint here :
December 31, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, HHS |
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