A battle for truth
The public relations industry and the covid era
Dear Church Leaders
“A Midwestern Doctor” (AMD) writes one of the best of the many Substacks that I have encountered. The articles are typically long but worthwhile.
I thought it worth sharing this recent article which I think goes a long way to explaining what has been happening in recent years.
This post is essentially a somewhat condensed version, with some [additional comments] here and there, not least to give additional input from a UK perspective.
If the word “conspiracy” jars somewhat, it might be worth considering Absalom in 2 Samuel 15. Or Shallum in 2 Kings 15:10-15. Or indeed how the plot to kill Jesus is described in Acts 4:27. Conspiracy is nothing new. And it is actually an offence in English law.
Anyhow, here goes…
Summary/TLDR
There has been a coordinated campaign to attack and defame anyone who has spoken out against the covid response. This has happened mainly on social media, e.g. getting people de-platformed, but also in real life, e.g. attempting to get medical licences revoked.
This coordinated campaign was the result of a “non-profit” organisation known as The Public Good Projects (PGP) which was directly linked to the pharmaceutical industry. The PGP used the industry funding it received to defend industry interests.
Covid vaccine safety advocates were able to get into the group where these campaigns were coordinated. In that group they discovered numerous public figures working with healthcare workers to attack anyone “promoting misinformation”. It also transpired that the most belligerent doctors on Twitter/X attacking those questioning the covid narrative belonged to these groups.
Some of the influencers advancing PGP’s message — e.g. through “Shots Heard” or its sister United Nations initiative “Team Halo” — had faked their credentials.
[Similar things have happened in the UK.]
Introduction
According to AMD, almost any viewpoint can be “proven” using the “correct” evidence and logic. He (or maybe she?) says, “Purely as a challenge, I’ve successfully done this in the past with beliefs I consider to be abhorrent and completely disagree with.” And familiarity with that process enables an understanding of how ephemeral the truth is, and how problematic it is that most people have filters through which they see reality that lead to them going through a similar process, even if it’s not deliberate. Though careful observation often reveals non-verbal signs that show when people are somewhat aware they are deceiving themselves.
He describes how he now tries hard to make a conscious effort to discern what is actually true. And how after going through that process for many years, he started being able to tell if what he was exposed to had a “solidity” to it or an “emptiness”.
Despite the AMD Substack being mainly about medicine, there has also been a focus on highlighting the work of public relations (PR) — a massive invisible industry worth $20 billion in the US last year — that continually shapes our perceptions of reality for its corporate and government clients. PR is the incredibly refined science of manipulating the public, and essentially is what lies between propaganda and marketing.
AMD has highlighted PR because, as the years have gone by, he has come to appreciate how a great deal of what happens in medicine is actually a product of how the consciousness and collective beliefs about our society are altered so that pharmaceutical products can be sold. And that it’s often a lost cause to try to debate the science behind a recommendation without considering PR involvement.
PR Campaigns
He describes PR as a “miracle” in terms of how extraordinarily effective it is at pushing through abhorrent policies, with some of its common tactics including:
Organising a massive amount of coverage of an event which supports someone’s narrative and was crafted to go viral. (He gives several examples, including how the Gulf War was sold to America by a fake testimony from a Kuwaiti girl (the daughter of the ambassador) who was coaxed to say the rampaging Iraqi army was invading hospitals and “taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor,” a line which was then repeated again and again by politicians around the world.)
Hiring focus groups to determine what language is most effective in persuading people to support your position, and then using that language relentlessly through the media.
Creating an endless number of “non-profit” organisations with nice names that actually advance the interests of the sponsoring industry.
Paying any number of experts — such as TV doctors and influencers — to promote a given message, and using connections and influence to arrange for them to be given a high profile on TV and radio.
[Prominent UK doctors on TV in the covid era included Dr Ranj Singh. And Dr Hilary Jones. And Dr Sarah Jarvis. And Dr Nighat Arif. And Dr Sara Kyat. The linked clips and articles have not aged well. Prominent UK influencers included Prof Trish Greenhalgh. And Prof David Strain. And Prof Devi Sridhar, who stated on BBC Newsround that “so far trials have shown the [covid] vaccine is 100% safe for children” (a claim for which the BBC quickly but quietly issued a low-key retraction without mentioning Sridhar by name).]
[UK newspapers were also instrumental in pushing the covid injections. See e.g. the snapshot below from The Times in March 2021, and this related two-minute video from Prof Norman Fenton.]
[As were many establishment figures in the UK — politicians, royals, actors, sportspeople, comedians, celebrities, musicians etc.]
[Update: It appears that Dr Ranj Singh was paid a substantial sum of money by AstraZeneca in 2022. And that a Dr Hilary Jones received money from several pharma companies during 2020-2022. As did Dr Sarah Jarvis. And Dr Nighat Arif. And Prof David Strain. I wonder how many more there were. And how many others — from government committee members to actors and pop stars, comedians, sportspeople, journalists, former politicians, celebrities etc. — were rewarded one way or another.]
But he (AMD) notes that PR tactics from previous campaigns are often used for the current one. And that once you’ve seen enough PR campaigns, it becomes very easy to recognise them.
Censoring the Internet
He goes on describe how PR has been increasingly effective as the mainstream media has become owned by a smaller and smaller number of people.
[According to this recent report, in the UK just three companies — DMG Media (publishers of the Daily Mail, Metro and the i), News UK (The Sun, The Times) and Reach (Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star) — dominate 90% of national newspaper circulation.]
A chosen PR campaign can thus be rapidly disseminated, while at the same time dissenting voices are largely excluded.
AMD observes that given the threat that the growth of the Internet has posed to approved narratives, it may not be a coincidence that technology companies have become gatekeepers of information online. And that, as these large platforms attracted a large enough audience to become “trusted sources” of information, they slowly transitioned to censoring things.
Over recent years there has been a tug-of-war between the increasing push for censorship and the increasing ability of the internet community to circumvent it. From a US perspective, AMD views this as having reached a tipping point in October 2016 when Barack Obama declared:
We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to… There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and [information] that we have to discard, because [it doesn’t] have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.
Around the same time, various campaigns were launched. This began with “Fake News” being blared everywhere until Trump attached the label to CNN, at which point the media pivoted. There followed relentless media messaging about the dangers of “misinformation”, with anything challenging the existing narrative receiving that label.
He also points out how public officials, up to and including the most senior members of governments, are frequently involved in PR campaigns, citing the example of President Ronald Reagan in the context of the 1980s campaign to raise awareness of skin cancer and create a morbid fear of the sun. The then-struggling profession of dermatology had spent $2 million hiring a PR firm to inflate their status, and were in the process of rebranding themselves as cancer doctors.
[We might also wonder, in countries such as the UK, about the extent to which the royal family might sometimes be involved in PR campaigns. And it is worth giving some thought as to why we see the news stories that we do. To what extent have PR companies been involved in pushing narratives in relation to e.g. climate, war, sexuality (LGBTQIA+ etc), the threat of pandemics (including bird flu), euthanasia…? And many other things.]
Around the time of Obama’s 2016 announcement, there was a co-ordinated campaign to push vaccine mandates across the US, which was part of a co-ordinated push by Bill Gates, the WHO and the WEF (among others) as part of a “Decade of Vaccines”. AMD notes that much of what happened during the covid era was laid out in their documents. And that because they knew that some of the public, particularly via the internet, would likely oppose what was being done, a lot of investment was made to pre-empt that opposition, as outlined in the chart below:
[NB Jikkyleaks, a medical whistleblower, has been one of the most perceptive and influential voices of the past few years. Like many others, he (or she) posts anonymously, presumably mindful of what happened to the likes of Brandy Vaughan:]
AMD notes that in this 2020 talk (and many others) PGP’s CEO explains:
how they monitor all anti-vaccine messages online 24/7
their plans to pay off local influencers around the country to promote vaccines and to use counter-terrorism tactics to turn everyone on the internet against the anti-vaxxers (who are “not nice people”) — discussed further in this article
And that, according to a later 2023 webinar about inoculating the public against misinformation, PGP regularly uses PR techniques.
AMD adds that he personally finds it amazing how the PGP CEO, in his numerous talks, characterises things being said online as “dangerous misinformation” when they have since been proven true (citing the example of monkeypox being a non-issue). He (AMD) adds that he suspects this PGP project was inspired by past pharmaceutical initiatives such as this infamous one:
Twitter/X and PR
AMD points out that one branch of the misinformation campaign was high-profile US scientist Peter Hotez going on a national media tour in 2019 to warn about the dangers the country was facing from online vaccine misinformation. As AMD sees it, this laid the foundation for rapidly censoring those questioning the covid narrative. After Obama’s 2016 speech there was an escalating level of censorship from all the major internet platforms. And this went into overdrive during the covid era to “protect us from dangerous misinformation”.
AMD observed major online censorship from 2016 onwards, sometimes behind the scenes (e.g. shadow-banning), and sometimes overtly against easy-to-target groups (e.g. the alt-right), which he took as a sign that more and more aggressive censorship was going to happen, much of which would be invisible.
And given that the censorship was very selective in who it targeted, he assumed — based on who the targets were — that it had to be some type of collaboration between the government and the pharmaceutical sector. He maintains that this was eventually confirmed by:
Discovering numerous major investments being made by Big Tech into the pharmaceutical industry
Elon Musk buying Twitter and choosing to release Twitter’s correspondence with the Federal Government, which showed a consistent pattern of Twitter complying with (illegal) requests from the Federal government to censor anything that threatened its narratives
AMD views Musk’s purchase of Twitter and making speech [relatively] free on it as monumental, as the platform’s structure is such that it allows ideas with merit to spread very quickly, with well-packaged pieces of truth reaching millions of people — and sometimes even making national headlines.
Private Social Media Groups
AMD describes how, before writing the Substack “The Forgotten Side of Medicine”, he would often join private online groups. And how in groups for healthcare workers (especially doctors), he repeatedly encountered people who pushed back strongly against anything which challenged the pharmaceutical narrative. Even when others in the group made it very clear the pharmaceutical products that they were using were clearly failing them (or their children).
When the covid era began, he joined what became the largest online covid group and noticed that:
Everyone was panicking because they couldn’t treat COVID-19 and considered themselves at risk.
Everyone was desperate for some type of guideline to be authored by an authority they could pass around so they could know what to do.
No one had any interest in considering alternative covid treatments, e.g. hydroxychloroquine. And whenever someone suggested such a treatment, the group descended upon them like a pack of hyenas.
AMD notes that the group was ready and willing to attack doctors questioning the covid narrative generally, citing the example of the A&E doctors in Bakersfield. After they gave a statement to the media that the harms of lockdowns were causing more harm than benefit (which is now generally accepted to be true), he observed that the online group became absolutely incensed and claimed e.g. that the doctors had a conflict of interest because they were losing business from lockdowns, and that the doctors were killing people with their misinformation.
He describes how the activists:
discussed filing complaints against the doctors with the local medical board in California
left fake negative reviews on Yelp pages for their Urgent Care business
joined together to write a statement they submitted to the ER doctors’ specialty college which resulted in those organisations publicly disavowing the doctors
In AMD’s view, this was really childish and ultimately didn’t matter (especially since the Bakersfield doctors ended up being proven completely correct), but was at the time seen as the group’s largest “accomplishment” (which they repeatedly patted themselves on the back for). He considered screen-capturing the discussions before leaving the group, but decided against it on the grounds of not supporting leaking people’s private communications regardless of how much he personally dislikes the individuals.
When AMD turned to Twitter, he noticed that there was a group of doctors with moderate sized followings (typically around 8-20k followers) who would consistently attack things that people he knew posted. He observed that:
They were very fast to respond to the posts.
They typically said the same things (which would then be copied by other people who weren’t doctors).
They shared many articles from sciencebasedmedicine.org, a site that is well known for belligerently and illogically attacking anything unconventional.
They resembled the doctors he has encountered in previous groups, including the ones attacking doctors questioning the covid narrative.
AMD describes how he initially he tried to engage them in dialogue, but found that they were unreasonable and unwilling to consider anything he mentioned, with their minds so set on confirming their reality that they would rapidly misinterpret something he wrote and then attack that misinterpretation of what he said. They would then refuse to discuss the subject when he pointed out that the misinterpretation was not what he said. And so after a while, on the advice of others, he stopped engaging with them. He notes that others have had similar experiences.
In the context of the above, he was fairly sure that the people he was encountering were in some sort of private group that was even more rabid than the ones he’d experience before.
Private Groups
When the covid vaccines arrived, AMD observed in his practice a deluge of vaccine-related severe injuries and deaths (which greatly exceeded what he had expected). And he noticed that most of his colleagues would make up remarkable rationalisations in their minds so as to keep on pushing the vaccines. Given that he had left the online covid groups some months earlier, he could only imagine what was happening there in the context of the vaccine rollout.
But he did notice that when doctors and nurses spoke publicly about vaccine harms, it was as if they had stirred up a beehive. Their posts were rapidly removed from Twitter, and many faced real-life professional repercussions, e.g. being fired from their job, losing hospital privileges, or having a lot of medical board complaints filed against them.1 He cites the example of Dr Mary Talley Bowden — see e.g. this recent TV piece and/or some of this recent speech she gave about her experience:
On April 1, 2021, Houston Methodist hospital — where I had privileges — announced it would become the first major employer and hospital in the country to mandate the covid shots. On that same day [the US Government Health Department] announced the launch of its vaccine propaganda machine, “COVID-19 Community Corps”. A group called Public Private Strategies led the initiative, partnering with 275 other groups in all different sectors — not only healthcare groups, but faith leaders, business leaders, veterans, minority leaders, unions… all of their efforts were financially backed by FEMA, the CDC and HHS [i.e. the US government]. The web of influencers and the funds they received was so vast and complicated that they have become virtually untraceable.
Five months later… the government and its “experts” decided American citizens lacked enough intelligence to make decisions about what to put in their bodies and declared all employers with 100 or more employees must force their staff to get the shots. In the wake of both the Houston Methodist and Biden mandates, I had many distraught patients coming to me debating whether to take an experimental shot with no long-term safety data or lose their jobs or opportunities for an education. Because I was doing so much testing, I was seeing that the shots were not stopping transmission nor lowering severity — the vaccinated outnumbered the unvaccinated and were just as sick if not sicker.
I reached out to [Houston] Methodist hospital to ask if they were witnessing the same trends; my concerns were dismissed. So I started to tell others, sending emails to my patients and posting on social media. On November 7, 2021, I tweeted the same message — “Vaccine mandates are wrong” — twenty-five times. This was in the midst of the third surge of COVID, eight months after the shots were rolled out and five months after Houston Methodist became the first hospital in the country to mandate the shots. Each of the 25 tweets included a different patient testimonial on how the mandates had affected them. At the time, I had very few followers, and I didn’t expect much response.
Five days later… a reporter from the Houston Chronicle reached out to me after a source from Houston Methodist informed him the hospital was suspending my privileges based on comments I had made on social media. I was blindsided and asked the reporter to check his sources because I had no knowledge of that. Then I went to Twitter and was shocked to see the hospital had tweeted I was spreading dangerous misinformation that was harmful to the community… They [later] reported me to the Texas Medical Board. Two and half years later, I am still trying to fight to restore my reputation and clear my professional record.
The medical mafia intended to silence me, to make an example of me, and indeed, I know their actions dissuaded other physicians from speaking up — I have heard from many of them. But not me. As my dad likes to say, they stepped on the wrong hornet. And I am thankful to be surrounded by other hornets today… People who have done the hard thing, at great personal sacrifice, to speak up and fight back. I am grateful to the independent journalists who have tirelessly worked — with very little compensation — to get our voices heard. I am grateful to the plaintiffs and the attorneys in this case who have invested the time and money to fight for all of us, so that we may speak freely without censorship and without fear of persecution. And I am grateful to all of you who have supported me and other physicians who have paid the price for speaking the truth. We need our voices now more than ever. With your help, we will prevail.
As it turned out, the group AMD suspected was operating did indeed exist. But he was surprised when he found out just how organised they were.
Public Good Projects (PGP)
(AMD credits much of what follows to Jikkyleaks (cf. earlier mention), investigative journalist John Davidson who recently released an excellent covid documentary called “Epidemic of Fraud” (which he spent the last year putting together; YouTube link and screenshot below), and Lee Fang of The Intercept.)
AMD contends that whenever a doctor aggressively defends pharmaceutical interests, they will repeatedly insist they are not taking money from the industry. But while this is true in many cases, the claims of such doctors often do not stand up to scrutiny.
He cites the example of Peter Hotez (who did the 2019 tour mentioned earlier), who has made such a claim, even though he began his career with a $100k grant from Pfizer, and during his career has overseen more than 100 million in grants, most of which went to a (still unsuccessful) hookworm vaccine. (And also notes that there are many career academics who make a living off getting grants which support industry interests and eat up public health funding but yield nothing of public benefit.)
He explains that one of the most common ways pharmaceutical payments are concealed is by using “trustable third parties” which effectively function as shell companies to hide the pharma money. As an example he cites the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) — “the largest trade organization to serve and represent the emerging biotechnology industry in the United States and around the globe,” which has pharma clients such as Moderna, J&J and Remdesivir’s manufacturer Gilead listed as core companies in their membership directory, and interlocking relationships with the leadership of many of these companies, e.g. BIO sharing a VP with Pfizer.
He also points to some interesting things revealed by Lee Fang, who, after being given access to the Twitter files, investigated the pharmaceutical industry’s repeated attempts to kill campaigns to allow other countries to produce covid vaccines at an affordable price.
Fang found that:
Stronger, a campaign run by PGP, regularly communicated with Twitter on regulating content related to the pandemic. The firm worked worked closely with [Twitter] to help develop bots to censor vaccine misinformation and, at times, sent direct requests to Twitter with lists of accounts to censor and verify.
Internal Twitter emails show show regular correspondence between an account manager at PGP and various Twitter officials, including Todd O’Boyle, a lobbyist with the company who served as a point of contact with the Biden administration. The content moderation requests were sent throughout 2021 and early 2022.
The entire campaign, newly available tax documents and other disclosures show, was entirely funded by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a vaccine industry lobbying group. BIO, which is financed by companies such as Moderna and Pfizer, provided Stronger with $1,275,000 in funding for the effort, which included tools for the public to flag content on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for moderation.
AMD also highlights:
That in 2023, PGP’s CEO stated on camera, “We were Twitter’s primary partner and helping them tackle vaccine misinformation during the pandemic up until November when it was that team was largely dismantled, um, and we still work pretty closely with all the social media companies.” And that BIO’s 221 tax documents (which can be viewed here) showed a payment of $883,000.
Fang’s description of how PGP, as shown within the Twitter files, aggressively orchestrated widespread censorship campaigns against anything that challenged pharmaceutical interests online.
John Davidson’s finding that many of the people in PGP had previously held high level positions in the Federal Government and within the the pharma sector etc.
He then turns his attention to Shots Heard, which, according to its website, is also a PGP project.
Shots Heard
AMD describes how Shots Heard was a Facebook group originally developed by two doctors to defend themselves against “anti-vaxxers” saying bad things about them online after they publicly pushed vaccines. And how it appeared that once PGP took it over, it became an attack machine that had its members hound dissident healthcare workers.
As an example, he cites some of what they did to Dr Mary Talley Bowden (mentioned earlier):
He notes that Dr Bowden was able to get the Texas medical board to drop these frivolous complaints against her (although it cost her over $125k in legal fees)…
…but that other individuals, including some he knows personally, have not been so fortunate.
AMD points out that, while he doesn’t like the people involved, he has redacted their personal information (despite it being otherwise available on the internet) on the basis that most of these people were replaceable cogs and that many others in the same circumstances would have acted as they did. He notes too that, while a list of all the members of Shots Heard has circulated across the internet, a decision was made not to publicly leak it since many of the group’s members were not active participants in this co-ordinated harassment and hence did not deserve to get caught up in the actions of their unscrupulous colleagues.
But he does mention some of the more zealous members of the group, including:
A fact-checker notorious for making false and misleading (pro-pharma) fact checks, some of which went viral due to their ridiculousness
Public health officials looking for ways to bypass legal prohibitions on censoring constituents commenting on the public postings of their agencies
School board members who pushed the vaccines on children
Richard Pan, the militant paediatrician and architect of California’s draconian vaccine mandates (described here, and who was protected by Shots Heard on social media)
Dorit Reiss, a UC San Francisco lawyer who played a pivotal role in the covid era, and who has been repeatedly given large platforms to push vaccine mandates and criminal penalties for those who did not comply with them
A Georgia State Representative who tried to push for legislation that would allow minors to “consent” to vaccination without their parents permission
A doctor who was a strong advocate for giving puberty blockers to children
A doctor who targeted another doctor known for advocating for doctors and medical students injured by the medical system
A sports reporter who persistently tried to get medical boards to remove the licences of anyone who questioned covid vaccine safety
And he notes that, in addition to de-licensing dissident healthcare workers, some of their other actions included:
A Pennsylvania doctor in 2022 getting the group to harass an Italian restaurant that protested against lockdowns and allowed members of the community to network with each other for doctors who provided early treatments for covid (eventually resulting in an official investigation into the restaurant and a large number of fake (bad) Yelp reviews)
Calling immigration services on Hispanic patients who received alternative covid care, in a bid to get them deported
Falsely labelling hospitalised vaccinated patients as unvaccinated because they sought alternative covid care
Contacting the employers of healthcare workers challenging the narrative, and trying to get dirt on them
Repeatedly sending death threats to the homes of such healthcare workers
Filing complaints with a view to getting major accounts deplatformed, e.g. Robert F Kennedy Jr on Instagram
Team Halo
AMD then describes a parallel initiative to Shots Heard, namely Team Halo, a United Nations project that trained scientists around the world, including some doctors, and deployed them on TikTok in “collaboration” with TikTok’s management (this was confirmed by the company).
[Team Halo. Hmm. Masquerading as angels of light? An example of Team Halo activity in the UK can be found here (accompanying Twitter/X link here):]
He says that when he reviewed the membership lists of Shots Heard and Team Halo, almost every single one of the“difficult” individuals he’d seen on Twitter, who had attacked those challenging the covid narrative, was a member of one or both groups. An exception was Peter Hotez, who maybe didn’t have time to be involved in this.
After being exposed, Team Halo’s website was deleted from the internet, but it still exists on the Wayback Machine:
The original website stated that:
Team Halo was as established as part of the United Nations Verified initiative in partnership with Purpose and the Vaccine Confidence Project at the University of London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Support is provided by [among others, the] IKEA Foundation [and the] Rockefeller Foundation.
[At the time of writing, a similar statement can be found on LinkedIn. Details of the many partners of the Vaccine Confidence Project can be found here]
AMD notes that on January 1st 2023, the Epoch Times conducted a brilliant exposé on Team Halo which included the experiences of nurse Nicole Sirotek (detailed further in this riveting interview).
Sirotek had previously talked at one of Ron Johnson’s Senate panels (one of which was featured in this early Dear Church Leaders post) about the lethal care she routinely saw covid patients receive:
She has since been the victim of ongoing harassment, and has received:
pictures of her children posed in slaughterhouses and hanging from a noose
drive-by photos of her house
letters with white powder that exploded upon opening
Moreover, the Nevada State Board of Nursing was inundated with calls for Sirotek’s professional demise and flooded with anonymous complaints, which can be traced back to Team Halo, who also targeted multiple other high-profile figures questioning the covid narrative, including Dr Robert Malone and Joe Rogan.
AMD also mentions the 77th Brigade, a military intelligence branch of England’s army that, according to a whistleblower, systematically (and essentially illegally) spied upon people (including prominent journalists and politicians) who expressed doubt about the covid response, e.g. the unjustifiable lockdowns. But he has no direct confirmation of any links between the 77th Brigade and the likes of PGP.
[Update: more details on the networks involved with PGP and Team Halo etc. in this three-minute video clip]
[Other notable UK examples]
[Aside from the 77th Brigade, other notable UK examples include:
Tory MP Neil O’Brien’s involvement in setting up a website to discredit:
academics (specifically Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), John Ioannidis (Stanford), and Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson at the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford)
journalists (including Peter Hitchens of The Mail on Sunday, Allison Pearson of the Telegraph, and Toby Young who founded The Free Speech Union and The Daily Sceptic website)
“online sceptics” (including former Pfizer Vice-President Dr Mike Yeadon and diagnostic pathologist Dr Clare Craig, who recently described how what happened during the covid era led her to become a Christian:
the activities of the “mutton crew”, not least in relation to Professor of Risk and Information Management Norman Fenton
this attempt to discredit HART (a group of mainly UK-based doctors, scientists, economists, psychologists and other academic experts)
UK doctors who have been harassed for speaking out include GP David Cartland, surgeon Ahmad Malik (whose podcasts are well worth a listen) and others such as those listed here.]
AMD says that his general impression from looking at everything PGP and Team Halo did was that they were grifters who saw attacking vaccine dissent online as a funding goldmine, and that they were focused on inflating their metrics (to get more funding) rather than doing basic due diligence.
He goes on to cite examples of individuals with fake credentials who he suspects were paid to promote the messages of Shots Heard and Team Halo.
Astroturfing and swatting
He then describes the practices of astroturfing and swatting:
Astroturfing is a term used to describe PR firms manufacturing fake “grassroots” movements which support their client’s message. Much of this is “digital astroturfing” conducted by bots.
Swatting refers to the fact that whenever SWAT teams respond to an incident, they are much more likely than typical officers to shoot once they arrive. Because of this, fake emergency calls implying a dangerous situation have been increasingly weaponised in the US. Typically, it’s just a massive inconvenience, but there have been multiple cases where people have died.
He likens the activities of the PGP to an organised form of astroturfing and “swatting”, the latter being done by encouraging death threats to be sent to those speaking out, or by trying to get them fired, or by trying to get medical boards to de-license them (sometimes on the basis of trumped-up charges — hardly a new tactic).
Conclusion
AMD says that because of the number of times he has seen the pharmaceutical industry pull the same scam on the public — e.g. much of what happened with the covid vaccines echoes what happened with HIV, HPV, and anthrax — he saw through the covid pandemic propaganda from the very start. He reiterates his earlier point that because PR uses fairly consistent methods to manipulate its audience, once someone becomes “immune” to those tactics, all of the messaging sounds very fake, and it takes on the “empty” quality mentioned near the beginning of the article.
He say he has found it depressing how the scams continued to be effective, and how, as time has gone by, things have got worse. But he emphasises that during the covid era something very strange happened. Not only was every single stop was pulled out to push the vaccines — essentially every PR thing that could be done, including e.g. lots of sleazy promotions — but the relentless campaign continued even when it was clear that a lot of people were being killed, and many more severely injured.
He says that we still don’t know exactly what prompted everyone to go all-in on promoting the vaccines. He acknowledges multiple theories — including depopulation (see e.g. this brief article), the launch of the mRNA vaccine industry, or a directive to change humanity’s DNA — but reckons that the honest truth is that no-one knows.
[Whatever the explanation is, it is almost certainly multi-faceted, and involves elements of greed and a desire for control. What we do know is that:
There is now a strong case for saying that essentially every aspect of the “covid” narrative was fake, and that by any reasonable definition there was no pandemic as such (which does not necessarily imply that no lab-made coronaviruses have been circulating)2
If there was a pandemic, it was one of lies and deception, of fraudulent PCR testing, of folly and gullibility, of fear and virtue-signalling, of groupthink and hysteria, and of greed and profiteering, aided and abetted by governments and corporate interests — not least those related to the media, pharma and public health
When credible and well-intentioned people spoke out they were (and still are being) censored (see the links in the earlier comments)
It was evident from established science that the so-called covid vaccines — whether DNA-based or mRNA-based — would be harmful
Even when the covid vaccine harms were evident, the push for them continued (and continues)
Whatever the end goal, if we consider covid as a “public health emergency” created for a “vaccine”, rather than a vaccine created for a public health emergency, a lot of things make a lot more sense.]
AMD then cites a series of posts from Jikkyleaks [expressing sentiments with which I can certainly identify]:
AMD contends that the biggest mistake was mandating covid vaccines for healthcare workers — presumably on the basis that they were the most likely group to comply with vaccination, and that they could then be used to create “trust” to sell the vaccines to everyone else. A major issue then emerged when when many healthcare workers were injured by the vaccines, and became willing to start publicly questioning everything they had been told, something which creates a huge problem for the authorities since the “public’s trust” of the medical system is built on what they hear from doctors and nurses.
[And in any case, it goes against basic medical ethics to pressurise anyone into taking a novel medical intervention with no-long-term safety data (or indeed any form of medical treatment). Voluntary and properly informed consent are vitally important (NHS website). As is “free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion” (Nuremberg Code). This recent preprint article — Medical Ethics and Facilitating Fully Informed Consent to Treatment — discusses some of these issues in the context of the covid era.]
AMD says that groups like Shots Heard are now trying to correct the mistake of pushing vaccine mandates, but that he thinks what they are doing is an exercise in futility as the truth was not on their side, and the “nightmare scenario” they had predicted, i.e. the public turning against vaccination) is now happening. He concedes that it is possible that if more money goes into the group, and they get more competent employees, they could make more of an impact, but reckons that public opinion has now turned so much against them that even that will not work.
He contends, along with many others [including me], that if the medical establishment wants to regain the public’s trust, it needs [at the very least] to start being honest and to stop misrepresenting its products. He acknowledges that medicine does many critical and important things right, but maintains that if those get blurred with blatantly unsafe and ineffective products being pushed for unscrupulous reasons (e.g. greed), the whole sector will suffer.
His hope is that public’s response to what was done during the covid era pandemic will make that lesson clear to the medical establishment — i.e. never repeat anything like covid because it will ultimately cost the industry a lot of money. But he reckons that since human beings never want to let go of wealth or power, many in the establishment have still not come to terms with the fact that their way of doing things will no longer fly. He cites the example of a lot of money being invested in the “next pandemic” and the way the WHO has been seeking to legalise what they did during the covid era for all future “emergencies”, despite dedicated activists having had some success in seeking to derail the proposed measures.
[And we should not forget that in 2020 the draconian covid policies were implemented without such a treaty. So maintaining the status quo is hardly desirable either.]
But he ends on a relatively positive note, saying that while the accounts he details are heartbreaking, he actually views them positively in that they have shown that the power of the medical industrial complex is actually quite limited, and that it simply can no longer compete when there is free diffusion of information on the internet [hence the recent further attempts of the authorities (such as this) to ramp up censorship]. He says that this is part of the reason why he has avoided directly attacking most of the people who co-ordinated these attacks, noting that while they are horrible people, they are simply a symptom of the current era that we are in, and that soon they will be viewed in the same way that the cultists from many other disastrous (and now widely reviled) social movements are.
Dear Church Leaders homepage (or via Substack, or e.g. DuckDuckGo, but not Google for some reason)
The Big Reveal — Christianity carefully considered (which can also be found via Substack, or e.g. DuckDuckGo, but not Google)
AMD notes that medical board complaints are a major issue for a doctor because they are extremely time-consuming and costly to deal with. The board is obligated to investigate any complaints they receive (especially those from doctors), and once you lose your license in one jurisdiction the other state medical boards will typically rescind it too. And that given that every physician does some things that are not in accordance with the existing practice requirements, if a medical board wants to find something to nail a doctor on, they typically can, so it’s very much a selective prosecution issue.
He gives the example of the numerous cases of surgeons making their hospitals lots of money being let off completely by the boards despite having killed lots of patients and had repeated complaints from their peers about how reckless their practices are. And contrasts that to numerous people he knows who have lost their licenses for trivial issues that no-one was harmed by and which no patient complained about. He adds that the worst part is that since having a medical licence is seen as a privilege, the normal legal protections offered in a court of law do not apply to medical board inquiries, so you often have to have a really good lawyer (and some good fortune) for a successful defence.
He says he has multiple friends who either lost their licence or had a serious sanction for the actions they took during the covid era. Actions which saved lives and harmed no-one. He finds it remarkable that the people who filed the complaints would never under any circumstances want it done to them, and would loudly proclaim it was the most unfair and cruel thing imaginable, and yet they gleefully did it to other people.
It is striking how little discussion there has been in the mainstream media (and at the UK covid inquiry) about whether we actually had a pandemic by any reasonable definition.
Even articles such as this recent one by John Redwood (belatedly) pushing back on the WHO pandemic proposals states that “the UK’s pandemic response was world-leading” (with no mention of Sweden). Similarly, this piece by Matt Ridley, a classic limited hangout on the covid vaccines (with minimal acknowledgement of the damage caused by the AstraZeneca injections and no mention of the harms caused by the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA products), speaks of how “the… jabs… contributed to the defeat of the pandemic”.
Moreover, the latter article includes statements — such as “the jabs undoubtedly saved lives” and “undoubtedly reduced the severity of the virus for vulnerable people” — which are made with no supporting evidence.
I am reminded that, after reporting on covid vaccine-related brain clots, the Telegraph (in which the above articles were published) “received a threatening phone call from a senior official at the MHRA warning that The Telegraph would be banned from future briefings and press notices if we did not soften the news” (link here; MHRA response here).
It is reasonable to suspect that at least some of the above is connected with media funding and conflicts of interest.