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COVID-19 Misinformation: How Our Government Failed America
Biden-Harris administration officials seriously misled the American people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a detailed and devastating report, the Republican majority of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations exposes “We Can Do This,” the administration’s two-year, $900 million public relations campaign during the pandemic. (The subcommittee is part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.)
The U.S. government’s massive PR effort focused on convincing the public that COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine mandates, masking (including the masking of children), and school closures were effective public policy interventions.
To conduct its PR offensive, the Biden-Harris administration contracted with the Virginia-based Fors Marsh Group for its multimillion-dollar media campaign. That company, the subcommittee notes, describes itself as a “full-service behavior change research and strategy firm.”
Launched as a means to combat COVID-19 “misinformation” and “boost vaccine confidence and suppress public skepticism,” the administration’s campaign effort itself became a vehicle for imposing or recommending scientifically invalid public policies.
Instead of “following the science,” the Biden-Harris administration’s agenda seemed to focus on shaping a dominant political narrative, echoed routinely in major media outlets. Ironically, the effort ultimately undermined confidence in the COVID-19 vaccines and helped to damage public trust in public health agencies.
The new House subcommittee report, chapter and verse, in charts and graphs, describes how and why this happened and how the federal government itself became a troubling source of “misinformation” amid one of the worst public health crises of modern times.
Vaccine Misinformation
In 2021, the Biden-Harris administration declared a level of effectiveness for the COVID-19 vaccines that was not scientifically supported.
In fact, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued its emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s vaccine on Dec. 11, 2020, the agency was explicit:
“At this time, data are not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person,” FDA said, using the scientific name of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The agency repeated this warning on the lack of evidence that the new vaccines would prevent transmission of the virus on Dec. 18, 2020, and again on Feb. 27, 2021.
That, however, made little difference to the Biden-Harris administration. Its vaccine messaging initially was confused, then became inaccurate.
In March 2021, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, then director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, declared that those who have been vaccinated “do not carry” the virus. This, though, was refuted quickly by career CDC staffers.
Nonetheless, the Biden-Harris administration persisted. It argued that vaccines and boosters were necessary for school reopenings, even while insisting that vaccinated kids continue masking. It also recommended that healthy children (as young as 6 months old) get the vaccines even though their risk of severe illness and death was negligible.
This vaccine policy made the U.S. an outlier among other advanced nations in the world, including the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Austria, and Germany.
In September 2021, the Biden-Harris administration announced a series of unprecedented public- and private-sector vaccine mandates, affecting 100 million Americans.
President Joe Biden insisted that the pandemic was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Such a claim was patently false. Vaccinated persons were routinely contracting the coronavirus at the time.
And recall that FDA, as noted, had not determined that the COVID-19 vaccines would prevent transmission of the virus.
So, the House subcommittee reports: “Despite this disclosure, high-ranking federal officials, including President Biden, knowingly made unsubstantiated claims about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines.”
In January 2022, the Supreme Court halted enforcement of most of the federal government’s vaccine mandates.
Masking Misinformation
At the inception of the pandemic in January 2020, leading public health officials discouraged the use of masks to ward off the virus or discounted the effectiveness of masks.
Suddenly, in April 2020, the CDC and its leading experts reversed their initial guidance against mask-wearing. By July, they declared masks a “critical tool” in the fight against COVID-19.
Even the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, who previously had dismissed masks as ineffective, soon advocated for aggressive adoption of local and national mask mandates. To this day, the scientific rationale for this radical reversal remains unclear.
In January 2021, the new Biden-Harris administration imposed mask mandates on all persons 2 years old and older for domestic and international travel. In January 2022, the administration updated its masking guidelines.
According to the House subcommittee report, many states followed CDC guidance to impose compulsory masking for about half of the nation’s 53 million schoolchildren.
Parents who raised concerns about how mask mandates affected their children were dismissed as “anti-vax” or extremists, despite their valid worries. A 2022 Politico-Harvard survey found that nearly half of parents believed that harmed their children’s emotional development, speech, and social interactions—concerns later backed by research in the professional journal Public Health in Practice.
Eventually, common sense aligned with scientific data. Dr. Ashish Jha, Biden’s White House COVID-19 coordinator, acknowledged in December 2022: “There is no study in the world that shows masks work that well.”
By then, however, the damage to children was done.
School Closures
The epidemiological evidence, including CDC data, demonstrated overwhelmingly that children were not at elevated risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19.
Despite mounting evidence that schools were not driving outbreaks, federal officials recommended extended school closures as a key feature of their COVID-19 response. By sharp contrast, many European countries followed a far more rational policy and reopened schools by mid-2020 with minimal spread of the disease.
Yet, the CDC continued to push for school closures well into 2021.
The Biden-Harris administration, through its high-priced PR campaign, doggedly emphasized masking, social distancing, and childhood COVID-19 vaccination even after it became clear that these policies weren’t necessary to keep schools open.
The administration’s refusal to align policy recommendations with the data not only disrupted education with school closures but helped to undermine public trust in the CDC’s messaging.
Politics, not science, influenced school closure policy. Congressional investigators revealed that teachers unions lobbied for extended closures and that the American Federation of Teachers influenced CDC policy. With schools around the nation closed, prolonged remote learning devastated children academically and emotionally; low-income students suffered the most, with big declines in math and reading scores.
The cost of the CDC’s policy recommendations—academic regression, emotional hardship, developmental delays, and worsening social inequality—will be felt for years to come.
Needed Reforms
The next president and the new Congress must address the serious shortcomings of our federal public health agencies, especially the CDC, as The Heritage Foundation recommended.
Obviously, agency officials should be transparent, cooperative with congressional requests for information, and held directly accountable for their decisions. That’s why congressional investigators recommend in the report that Congress formally authorize the CDC, clearly define its role and responsibility, and clarify its “core mission.”
That mission should be to protect the American people from deadly infectious diseases.
Beyond that, based on its findings, the House subcommittee report makes several other positive recommendations. Among the most notable is that the CDC or any other public health agency should be prohibited from making claims about an FDA-approved product, such as a vaccine, that is incompatible with or goes beyond the FDA approval.
Likewise, Congress also must address deficiencies in evaluating the safety of vaccines and improve the quality of data collection and reporting of adverse reactions or vaccine injuries.
Reforming the federal public health agencies is a big job. The next presidential administration and the new Congress have a lot of work to do.
The post COVID-19 Misinformation: How Our Government Failed America appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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