Story at a Glance:•There has been a coordinated campaign to attack and defame anyone who has spoken out against the COVID-19 response. This has primarily been restricted to social media (e.g., getting people deplatformed) but it has also been weaponized in real life (e.g., getting medical licenses revoked).

•This coordinated campaign was the result of a “non-profit” known as The Public Good Project (PGP), which was actually directly linked to the pharmaceutical industry. The PGP used the industry funding it received to defend industry interests.•Vaccine safety advocates were able to get into the group where these campaigns were coordinated. There, they discovered numerous public figures working hand in hand with healthcare workers to descend like a hive of bees on anyone “promoting misinformation.” Likewise, we learned that the most belligerent doctors we keep encountering on Twitter belonged to these groups.

•Some of the influencers advancing PGP’s message through “Shots Heard” (and its sister United Nations initiative “Team Halo”) were hucksters who faked their own credentials. My overall impression from looking at everything was that this group operated in a very similar manner to many of the sleazy internet marketing operations I’ve seen in the past. Fortunately, the public appears to be seeing through what they did.

Almost any viewpoint can be “proven” using the “correct” evidence and logic. Purely as a challenge, I’ve successfully done this in the past with beliefs I consider to be abhorrent and completely disagree with. Once you become familiar with the process, you begin to gain an appreciation for how ephemeral the truth is and how problematic it is that most people have filters they see through reality through that lead to them doing this even if it’s not deliberate (although if you watch carefully for it, you’ll often see non-verbal signs that show they are somewhat aware they are lying to themselves).

For some reason, this realization directly conflicted with my deepest values (which to this day I don’t know the source of as they just existed long before I had learned about the world), so my own way of seeing the world reoriented around trying to discern what was actually true rather than proving I was right (e.g., to hold onto the illusion I know what was going on) in the hopes the truth could become something tangible rather than this ephemeral fiction our hands and minds constantly passed through. In turn, a major reason why I approach most topics I present here by fairly presenting both sides is because I found it was one of the things necessary for me to pass through that ephemeral layer of truth that clouds almost everything.Note: after going through this process for years, I started being able to tell if what I was exposed to had a “solidity” to it or an “emptiness” and a large part of how I filter reality now is by focusing my attention to the things that appear to have solidity (rather than them conforming to what I want to be true). In the past, I’ve mentioned how I will constantly debate and scrutinize each idea I am considering before deciding which one to adopt (which is important to do), but I view this discernment of solidity and emptiness to be much more important for arriving at what rings true.

Despite this publication being about medicine, I’ve repeatedly focused on highlighting the work of public relations (PR), a massive invisible industry (e.g., 20 billion was spent on it in America last year) that continually shapes our perceptions of reality for its corporate and government clients. Briefly, PR is the incredibly refined science of manipulating the public, and essentially is what lies between propaganda and marketing.

I have done this because as the years have gone by, I’ve come to appreciate how much 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 unless you understand the PR at play.Note: this is not that different from how many people who have an ulterior financial motive will inevitably arrive at the conclusion which supports their financial interests regardless of how hard you try to convince them not to. For example, listen to this talk below the co-founder of Shots Heard gave about why no one online could possibly have a valid reason to question vaccine safety, that no doctor who promotes vaccines is being paid off to do so, and why it was necessary to censor all of those opinions—while conveniently neglecting to mention he’s received over $200,000.00 from vaccine companies.

PR Campaigns

The “miracle” of PR is how effective it is, and I’ve now lost count of how many times an abhorrent policy that few Americans wanted was pushed through by a well financed PR campaign. In turn, I would argue PR has effectively altered policymaking from being a process of crafting an idea which is acceptable to the public (this is essentially how Democracy is supposed to operate). To simply making sure what is being done isn’t so far out of line it will be prohibitively expensive for a PR firm to sell it to the public.

For reference, some of the common PR tactics include:1. Organizing a massive amount of coverage of an event which supports someone’s narrative and was crafted to go viral. For example:•The founder of PR was infamous for convincing women across America to take up smoking by staging a women’s suffrage (right to vote) protest and having them all smoke their “liberation torches” as part of the protest).•The Gulf War was sold to America by a fake testimony from a Kuwaiti girl (who was 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 (e.g., Bush) around the world.•In 2022, one actor made a joke about Will Smith’s wife having hair loss due to alopecia (a known side effect of the mRNA vaccines) which quickly went viral on every network.

This was very usual. However, it just so happened that Pfizer was sponsoring the Oscars, and had just announced a positive result in their pivotal phase 2b/3 trial clinical trial for their new alopecia drug, and had recently begun the marketing push in anticipation of its FDA approval (which happened exactly a year later, with an annual course of the drug being priced at $49,000.00). While it’s impossible to know what actually happened behind the scenes, individuals did come forward alleging the whole thing was scripted.2. Hiring focus groups to determine what language is the most effective in persuading people to support your position and then blasting it on every public announcement and news station (e.g., the local ones) simultaneously. This often goes hand in hand with producing news programs for the stations (which are effectively PR productions for their sponsors). To illustrate one example of this approach being used:

3. Creating an endless number of “non-profit” organizations with nice names that actually advance the interests of the sponsoring industry. For example, the “non-profit” Foundation for Clean Air Progress is an industry front group that has aggressively lobbied both the public and the government to reduce the existing air quality standards mandated by the Clean Air Act. Likewise, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society took in 172 million dollars last year and is notorious for blocking many proven treatments for MS from seeing the light of day, while continuously supporting lucrative new drugs to “manage” the disease.

4. Paying off an endless number of experts to promote your message and having them be hosted on networks that are already in your pocket.

I cannot state how effective PR is and how depressing it has been to watch each candidate I supported get torpedoed by the media industrial complex.

However, while the effect of PR is remarkable, many of the people who work in the industry aren’t that talented, and as a result, they will just copy existing (and proven) PR tactics for the current campaign. Because of this, once you’ve seen enough PR campaigns, it becomes very easy to recognize one being enacted.Note: two things allowed me to accurately predict most of what happened during COVID-19. One was being familiar with the same script having been followed during the HIV epidemic, and the other was seeing the PR campaigns for it be enacted in real time and recognizing the implications of each stage I observed (as the campaigns are typically structured in a sequential series of steps which eventually arrive at their sponsor’s desired outcome).

Censoring the Internet

The primary thing which has allowed the existing PR model to work has been the fact there is an (ever increasing) monopoly over the mass media. Because of this, a chosen PR campaign can be rapidly disseminated across the country while simultaneously, no dissenting narratives are allowed to air that challenge it.

Recognizing that the internet was the fatal weakness of the existing system, I suspect (but can’t prove) that a decision was made to have large internet companies become gatekeepers of information online, and in turn, as these large platforms attracted a large enough audience to become the “trusted sources” of information, they slowly transitioned to censoring things.

In turn, we saw a tug of war occur between the increasing pushes for censorship and the increasing ability of the internet community to bypass the attempts that were made to censor them. This eventually hit a tipping point, when in October 2016, Obama gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon where he declared:

Parallel to this declaration, 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. We saw an endless number of media messages about the dangers of “misinformation” ( followed by anything challenging the existing narrative, in turn receiving that label).

Note: public officials (like the instance of Obama mentioned above or Biden throughout the COVID vaccine push) are frequently involved in PR campaigns. For example (as discussed within a recent article on Dermatology’s disastrous war against the sun), in the 1980s, the struggling profession of dermatology spent 2 million dollars hiring a public relations firm to inflate their status and were suggested to rebrand themselves as cancer doctors. This in turn was accomplished by:1. Offering campaigns beginning in 1985 to provide skin examinations to bring awareness to “skin cancer” and having widespread strategic media coverage of those campaigns.2. Convincing Ronald Reagan to sign proclamations for “National Skin Cancer Prevention and Detection Week,” and “Older Americans Melanoma/Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention Week.3. Creating a mortal fear of the sun (which persists to a truly absurd degree these days) despite the fact people that who avoid the sun are 60-130% more likely to die than those who get moderate or high amounts of it (e.g., smokers who get regular sunlight have the same risk of dying as nonsmokers who avoid the sun).4. Equivocate melanomas (which are rare, dangerous, and caused by a lack of sun exposure) to basal cell carcinomas (which are common, never fatal, and caused by sunlight) since both are “skin cancers” so people can be corralled into regular skin examinations where those skin cancers are identified and quickly surgically removed.5. Dermatology became one of the highest paying specialties in medicine, and the number of diagnosed skin cancers greatly increased, but there have been minimal changes in the actual death rates of skin cancers. Simultaneously, since those surgeries pay a lot, the profession lost all motivation to determine the actual causes of skin cancer, safe and effective non-surgical treatments for skin cancer, or how to make the sun heal rather than damage the skin.

What I find particularly interesting about Obama’s announcement was that it happened at the same time a coordinated campaign (spearheaded in California) was being conducted to push vaccine mandates across the nation, which were part of a coordinated push by Bill Gates, the WHO, and the WEF (amongst others) to launch a “decade of vaccines” as much of what we saw later throughout COVID-19 was laid out in their documents. Since they knew the public, through the internet would likely oppose this, a lot of investments were made to preempt that. For example:

Note: in this 2020 talk (and many others) PGP’s CEO explains how they monitor all anti-vaccine messages online 24/7 and 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. Finally, in a later 2023 webinar about inoculating the public against misinformation, the CEO also mentions they regularly use PR techniques. What I personally find amazing about his numerous talks is that he characterizes things being said online (e.g., that monkeypox was a non-issue) as “dangerous misinformation” which has since been proven true. Likewise, I suspect this project was inspired by past pharmaceutical initiatives like this infamous one.

Twitter (𝕏) and PR

One branch of the misinformation campaign was Peter Hotez going on a national media tour in 2019 about the dangers the country was facing from online vaccine misinformation, which in turn laid the foundation for rapidly censoring any voices online that dissented against the COVID narrative. Because of this, we saw an escalating level of censorship from all the major internet platforms after Obama’s 2016 speech which then kicked into overdrive during COVID-19 to protect us from dangerous misinformation.

At the time this began in 2016, it became very clear to me that major online censorship was occurring, some of which was happening behind the scenes (e.g., shadow banning) and some of which was happening overtly towards easy to target groups (e.g., the alt-right) which I took as a sign more and more aggressive censorship was going to happen, much of which we would not see.

Simultaneously, since the censorship was very selective in who it targeted, based on who it targeted, while I couldn’t “prove it,” I assumed it had to be some type of collaboration between the government and the pharmaceutical sector. This was eventually confirmed by two things:•Discovering numerous major investments being made by Big Tech into the pharmaceutical industry.•Elon Musk buying Twitter (𝕏) and making the choice to publicly release Twitter’s correspondences with the Federal Government, which in turn showed a consistent pattern of Twitter complying with (illegal) requests from the Federal government to censor anything that threatened its narratives. Those documents in turn led to a landmark case that placed an injunction against the Federal Government (which Biden is currently trying to appeal at the Supreme Court).

From my perspective, Elon buying Twitter and making free speech on it was monumental as in addition to it being a large venue for free speech, it’s structure was such that it allowed ideas with merit to spread very quickly, and again and again, I saw well packaged bits of truth reach millions of people (and sometimes make national headlines)—something I’d never witnessed before on any media platform.

When I reflected on why this is, I realized that this frequently cited internet quote described it.

Note: I describe myself as “liberal” but the current definition of “the left” is very different from what many of us signed up for when we became Democrats.

Private Social Media Groups

Prior to my free time getting eaten up by this newsletter, I would often join private online groups with anonymous accounts so I can get a sense of the sociology of different demographics and get a much larger pool of data to work with (e.g., I find what’s in support groups for people with pharmaceutical injuries to often be much better than what I can find in papers).

One of the demographics I often sample are groups for healthcare workers (especially physicians) and again and again, I was struck by how their discourse always got taken over by left-wing physicians who vehemently hated anything which challenged the pharmaceutical narrative, even when the members made it very clear the pharmaceuticals they were using were clearly failing them (or their children).

By the time COVID started, I joined what later became the largest online COVID-19 group and noticed within it:•Everyone was panicking over the fact they couldn’t treat COVID-19 and were 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 treatments for COVID-19 (e.g., hydroxychloroquine), and whenever someone suggested the group descended upon them like a pack of hyenas.•The group was very willing to go after dissident physicians. For example, after the ER doctors in Bakersfield 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), the group became absolutely incensed about (e.g., they claimed it was being done because the doctors had a conflict of interest since they owned an urgent care which lost business from lockdowns and they stated the doctors were killing people with their misinformation). In turn, the Covid group activists discussed filing complaints against the doctors with California’s medical board, left fake negative reviews on Yelp pages for their Urgent Care business, and joined together to write a statement they submitted to the ER doctor's specialty college which resulted in those organizations publicly disavowing the doctors. All of that was really childish and ultimately didn’t matter (especially since the Bakersfield doctors ended up being proven completely correct), but as far as I could tell during the year I spent in the group, it was their largest “accomplishment” (which they repeatedly patted themselves on the back for).Note: I debated screen capturing all of this before I left the group, but I decided not to because I don’t support leaking people’s private communications regardless of how much I personally dislike the individuals.

Once I started spending time on Twitter, I noticed there was a group of doctors with moderate sized followings (e.g., typically around 8-20k followers) who would consistently attack things people I knew tweeted out. What was noteworthy about it however was that:•They were very fast to respond to these posts.•They typically said the same things (which would then be copied by other people who weren’t doctors). They also tended to continually share articles from sciencebasedmedicine.org, a site that is well known for belligerently and illogically attacking anything unconventional.Note: I periodically read the articles on that site as a quick way to verify if there is a valid argument against something I am considering. While I feel they are mostly full of it (like their predecessor Quackwatch), they will catch valid counterarguments (if they exist) and hence save me a lot of time.•They felt and thought very similar to the difficult physicians I’d seen in the previous groups (e.g., the COVID ones).•Initially I tried to engage with them in dialogs, but I found they were completely unreasonable or willing to consider anything I mentioned (e.g., their minds were so set on confirming their reality, that they would rapidly misinterpret something I wrote and attack their misinterpretation of what I said, but then refuse to discuss the subject when I pointed out that was not what I said). After a while, I got the sense they were fairly similar to many of the other trolls I’d engaged with online in the past and despite being MDs, weren’t actually very intelligent, so I heeded the advice Ed Dowd gave me “never engage a troll—all you accomplish is give them a platform and elevating them.”Note: Steve Kirsch has been trying for years to get these people to debate with him, but while they frequently disparage him, they’ve ardently refused to debate Steve

Because of the above points, I was relatively certain these people had to be in some type of private group which was even more rabid than the ones I’d been in before, but I just didn’t feel motivated to track it down. However, I was a bit surprised when I found out just how organized they were.

Private Groups

I lost patience with the physicians in the COVID groups, so I was gone from them long before the vaccines hit the market. Nonetheless, once they did and I began to see an immediate deluge of severe injuries and deaths (which greatly exceeded what I had expected for the vaccine), I noticed most of my (fairly conservative) colleagues would make up remarkable rationalizations in their minds to keep on pushing the vaccines so I could only imagine what was happening in these left-wing groups.

Fortunately, doctors and nurses did start speaking out publicly, and I noticed each time they did, it was like they stirred up a beehive, with their posts rapidly getting removed from Twitter and many of them facing 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). For example, this is what happened to Dr. Bowden:

Note: 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. Furthermore, every physician does things that are not in accordance with the existing practice requirements, so 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 (e.g., there are numerous cases of surgeons making their hospitals lots of money that have killed lots of patients and had repeated complaints from their peers about how reckless their practices are let off completely by the boards, whereas I know numerous people who have lost their licenses for trivial issues that no one was harmed by and no patient complained about). The worst part is that since having a medical license 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 luck to defend against this process.

I, in turn, have multiple friends who either lost their license or had a serious sanction for the actions they took to save lives during COVID-19, which to be very clear, did not harm anyone, so this tactic works. The thing I find remarkable about this is that the people who filed those complaints would never under any circumstances want it done to them and would loudly proclaim it was the most unfair and cruel thing imaginable—yet they gleefully did it to other people. This essentially is why I never leaked the posts from the groups I was in regardless of how much they bothered me, if I was in their shoes I wouldn’t want it done to me.

As it turns out, the group I suspected was operating did indeed exist, and as I later learned they were much more organized than I’d initially suspected.

Note: much of what follows comes from my favorite anonymous mouse, Jikkileaks, investigative journalist John Davidson who recently released an excellent COVID-19 documentary called 'Epidemic of Fraud,’ (which he spent the last year putting together) and Lee Fang of the Intercept.

The Public Good Project

Whenever a physician aggressively defends pharmaceutical interests, they will repeatedly insist they are not taking money from the industry. In many cases this is true, but whenever you look into it, you will consistently find many of those doctors actually are. For example, Peter Hotez has claimed that, yet his career was begun with a $100,000.00 grant from Pfizer, and during his career, he has overseen more than 100 million in grants, most of which went to a (still unsuccessful) hookworm vaccine.Note: 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.

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 pharmaceutical money.

Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is “the largest trade organization to serve and represent the emerging biotechnology industry in the United States and around the globe,” with many pharmaceutical clients (e.g., you can find 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 shares a VP with Pfizer).After being given access to the Twitter files, Lee Fang made an interesting discovery while looking at the pharmaceutical industry’s repeated attempts to kill campaigns to make the COVID-19 vaccines not be proprietary intellectual property (and hence possible for other countries to produce at an affordable price):

Note: 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.”

BIO’s tax documents (which can be viewed here) showed:

PGP in turn, as shown within the Twitter files, aggressively orchestrated widespread censorship campaigns against anything that challenged pharmaceutical interests online. Additionally, as unearthed by John Davidson, many of the people in the Public Good Project previously had high level positions in the Federal Government and within the pharmaceutical industry (along with the Bill Gates Foundation and many prestigious medical centers).

In addition to directly lobbying social media to protect pharmaceutical initiatives, PGP also spearheaded the Shots Heard initiative (e.g., it says so at the bottom of their website and PGP’s CEO has admitted it in interviews). Note: an archived version of their website can be viewed here.

Shots Fired

PGP’s CEO is surprisingly transparent and consistent in his views. For example, in a 2023 talk at the Aspen Institute titled “The War on Misinformation,” he stated that the greatest problem with the anti-vaccine movement was dissident healthcare workers abusing their credentials to trick the public into thinking there was a credible reason to have doubts about vaccine safety. In his words:

Shots Heard was a Facebook group which was originally developed by two physicians to defend themselves against mean anti-vaxxers saying bad things about them online after they publicly promoted pro-vaccine talking points. As best as I can gather, once PGP took it over, although they claimed it still primarily served that role (protecting pro-vaccine doctors who were being traumatized by their online harassment), in reality it transformed into an attack machine that had all its members one by one go after any dissident healthcare worker and get them both delicensed and banned from the internet (which is essentially what the group claimed it existed to prevent being done to doctors being unfairly attacked by the anti-vaccine movement).Note: the term crybully is used to describe people who ruthlessly go after people they don’t like but simultaneously constantly claim to be victims anytime someone calls them out (Eric Cartman from Southpark is probably the most well-known example of this in popular culture).

This for example is some of what they did to Dr. Bowden:

Fortunately, 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). Unfortunately, other individuals (e.g., friends of mine) who have been subjected to this were not as fortunate.

Note: while I do not at all like these people, I have deliberately redacted their personal information from this article despite it being otherwise available on the internet as I believe most of these people were replaceable cogs and that many others in the same circumstances (based on my numerous interactions) would have acted as they did. Additionally, 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 coordinated harassment and hence did not deserve to get caught up in the actions of their unscrupulous colleagues.

Some of the more zealous members of the group included:•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 (who were looking for ways to bypass the legal prohibitions on censoring their constituents who comment on the public postings of their agencies).•School board members who pushed the vaccines on their children.•Richard Pan (the architect of California’s widely protested and draconian vaccine mandates which targeted doctors who wrote medical exemptions and paved the way for the vaccine mandates we saw sweep across the nation).Note: Shots Heart would also mobilize to protect Pan on social media.•Dorit Reiss, a UC San Francisco lawyer who played a pivotal role in pushing those bills through and who has been repeatedly given large platforms to advocate for the legality of vaccine mandates and the need for 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 (which has been repeatedly used to forcefully vaccinate children at school) and opposed legislation that would prohibit gender transition surgeries on minors or prevent vaccine passports. •A doctor who was a strong advocate for giving puberty blockers to children (an incredibly dangerous practice I previously argued was motivated by how profitable those drugs are).

•A doctor who targeted another doctor who was known for advocating for doctors and medical students injured by the medical system.

•A sports reporter who would continually try to get medical boards to take away the licenses of anyone who questioned COVID vaccine safety.•An anonymous Canadian cardiologist (who per my understanding was identified) who put a lot of time into getting all “anti-vaccine” content he could find on the internet deleted (along with having reports being filed against healthcare practitioners who dissented against what was happening).

In addition to delicensing dissident healthcare workers (which included friends of mine), some of their other actions included:

•In 2022, one Pennsylvania doctor got the group to go after a Pizza parlor which protested the lockdowns and allowed members of the community to network with each other for doctors who provided hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin for COVID-19 (one of whom the instigating doctor was able to get fired). This eventually resulted in officials investigating the parlor, and a large number of fake (bad) Yelp reviews of the parlor.

•Called immigration services on Hispanic patients who received alternative COVID-19 care to try and get them deported.•Falsely labeled vaccinated patients who were hospitalized as unvaccinated because they sought alternative COVID-19 care.•Contacted the employers of dissident healthcare workers to try and get dirt on them.•Repeatedly sent death threats to the homes of dissident healthcare workers.•Got dissident healthcare workers expelled from their educational programs.

•Would swarm and get enough complaints for major accounts to be deplatformed (e.g., RFK Jr. on Instagram).So in short, I would argue these individuals had serious ethical shortcomings.

Team Halo

A parallel initiative to Shots Heard was Team Halo. On Sep. 20, 2022, the under-secretary-general for global communications at the United Nations, appeared at the World Economic Forum to discuss how the United Nations was “Tackling Disinformation“ regarding ”health guidance“ as well as the ”safety and efficacy of the vaccine” for COVID-19, stating that their goal was to mass deploy influencers. She specifically emphasized the importance of their Team Halo project, which trained scientists around the world, and some doctors, and deployed them on TikTok in “collaboration” with TikTok’s management (which TikTok confirmed when asked).

Note: when I reviewed the membership lists of Shots Heard and Team Halo, every single one of the“difficult” individuals I’d seen on Twitter who compulsively attacked anyone who challenged the COVID narrative was in one or both of them. The only exception was Peter Hotez, who I assume either didn’t have time to be involved in this (as he has a much larger platform than the rest of them) or because he is much more cautious about stating incriminating things in public (e.g., he’s well known for never allowing questions from unvetted audiences).

After being exposed, Team Halo’s website was deleted from the internet (but still exists in this archive [and this archive of that archive]). In addition to listing its members, the now deleted website stated that:

Note: as you might guess, the Vaccine Confidence Project is funded by most of the major vaccine manufacturers and they have still not gotten the memo to take Team Halo off their list of partners.

Additionally, Team Halo was a group created and managed by a non-profit called ‘Purpose’, which is owned by Capgemini, a French IT company and defense contractor. Team Halo essentially picked unknown medical professionals and gave them massive numbers of followers on TikTok (another partner) to combat ‘misinformation’ (which typically involved them swarming dissidents online).Note: I have completely avoided TikTok, so I’ve avoided trying to provide any commentary on the platform in this article.

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) after she talked about the lethal care she routinely saw COVID-19 patients receive at one of Ron Johnson’s Senate panels.

Note: some of the individuals targeted by Team Halo included Dr. Robert Malone, Joe Rogan, Dr. Simone Gold, Dr. Scott Johnston and Tulsi Gabbard.

As you might imagine, like Shots Heard, Team Halo also actively encouraged delicensing dissident healthcare workers (in addition to trying to organize viral campaigns on TikTok, they had guides on their website for how to file complaints). In turn, they would frequently instigate these types of postings:

Note: recently it was revealed through a whistleblower that the 77th Brigade, a military intelligence branch of England’s army systematically (and essentially illegally) spied upon everyone (including prominent journalists and politicians) who expressed doubt about the COVID response (e.g., the unjustifiable lockdowns). Since that is also what PCP’s CEO (on camera) constantly boasts about PGP’s ability to do, many hence suspected the 77th brigade was connected to Team Halo and Shots Heard. While this is quite possible (especially since all those groups had extensive ties to the government and pharmaceutical), I was not able to find any direct confirmation of this.

Fake Credentials

My 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 hence they were focused on inflating their metrics (to get more funding) rather than doing basic due diligence. This for example is why in public talks, the CEO stated that they vetted everyone who got access to their “password protected” data since they knew many anti-vaxxers would try to infiltrate them, but simultaneously, the Shots Heard Facebook group (which was moderated by PGP’s employees) let in anyone who wanted to join and hence allowed our people to share what happened inside it.

Similarly, after it was dug into, we begin finding examples of where they brought on (and likely paid) individuals with fake credentials to promote their messages. For example:

Allison Neitzel

In 2021, Allison Neitzel MD burst onto the scene after offering scathing criticisms of people challenging the COVID vaccine, and before long her editorials were platformed by major networks like CNN.Note: in PR, you will often see campaigns use fabricated messages that fit well with the campaigns objective, as once they are uncovered and shown to be fake, the campaign has already accomplished its goal.

Because of how nasty Neitzel was to the vaccine skeptics, it eventually prompted some digging into her background where it was discovered after she graduated from medical school, she never went to residency. When asked, she said this was because she “wanted to pursue a non-clinical career” but it was most likely because she was not qualified to get into a residency (as typically 99% of medical students participate in the match, and around 5% don’t initially match but most are then able to once they scramble for the unfilled spots). This raised some red flags since technically she was misrepresenting her credentials as she was not a licensed doctor.Note: the vaccine zealots frequently use absurd double standards (e.g., see the previous point about crybullies). David Gorski (who continually goes after the credentials of any dissident physician) for example relentlessly defended her lack any post-graduate medical training (while representing herself as a doctor) and the horrible harassment she endured (even though Neitzel’s group did far worse to a lot of people).

When journalist Paul Thacker dug further into Neitzel, he discovered that the organization which initially platformed her and her letter in their “journal,” the National Association of Medical Doctors (NAMD) was likely fabricated. To be more specific, the group claimed to have been founded in 1974 and have 80,000 physician members, yet their physical address was…a Ship N Mail store mailbox (which is a common way people register fake corporations). Additionally, the emails for their media relations officers (Joan Diaz and Liz Cordoni) bounced, and their phone number went to “Michael’s” voicemail. Additionally, Thacker noticed all their information (e.g., media contacts, executive titles and leadership), was shared by another sketchy medical group, the American Society of Registered Nurses (ASR), which likewise was registered to a nearby mailbox (this time at a UPS store in San Francisco).

When I reviewed the available issues of NAMD’s journal (there weren’t many) they all looked like AI generated marketing copy you commonly see on scammy internet market sites (e.g., those trying to sell you miracle diet pills). Based on all of this, I was left with the impression these organizations were fabricated by a private contractor looking to cash in on the money being spent to “fight the anti-vaxxers” (as you see so many variants of this in the internet marketing—which is a huge part of why I refuse to publicly advertise products here) and that Nietzel signed up for the job since she needed some way to pay off her massive medical school loans.

Note: I have heard of lawsuits being filed against startup medical schools that admitted and graduated numerous students they should not have (as those students being enrolled pay the school’s bills) who then failed to match a residency, as this essentially constituted fraud and harmed the students who were left with the cost of those loans. This is to again illustrate the situation Neitzel was likely in (especially since she has nothing to show for her alternative career path such as a large volume of research).

Astroturfing and Swatting

Astroturfing describes fake plastic grass many people use (since its less of a hassle to take care of than real grass), and has come to be the term used to describe PR firms manufacturing fake “grassroots” movements which support their client’s message (e.g., the previously mentioned “patient advocacy” groups). Astroturfing has become very popular on the internet, and what many of us have noticed over the decades, especially on more public forums (e.g., Reddit) is more and more of the content there is essentially just digital astroturfing (e.g., lots of bots do this and China’s government is well known for paying people to produce half a billion fake posts a year).Note: to illustrate astroturfing in action, this is an example of a politically driven post which was republished but has the exact same comments as it did 10 months ago, something which can only be explained if all the comments are being left are pre-scripted ones meant to create the illusion of human engagement (which is further supported by the fact real people who would provide non-scripted options are routinely banned from these forums).

Swatting refers to the fact that whenever Swat teams respond to an incident, due to the nature of it (e.g., an armed hostage situation), they are much more likely than typical officers to shoot once they arrive. Because of this, one of the nasty things the left has weaponized over the years has been to call in fake 911 calls which imply a dangerous situation is occurring that requires a swat response, and in turn, there have been multiple cases where people died. Typically however, it’s just a massive inconvenience, and many prominent right-wing figures people have been repeatedly swatted. Sadly, while swatting is illegal and police departments don’t like it, it’s hard to stop it and often to even trace, so it keeps on happening and offenders are rarely prosecuted.

If you consider everything that the PGP has accomplished, it’s essentially been a more organized form of astroturfing and “swatting,” the latter being done either by encouraging death threats to be sent against dissidents, to get them fired, or to have medical boards delicense them (since as noted above, the individuals were instructed to falsely claim they were the patient who was harmed).Note: I mentioned the "left can’t meme” quote earlier in the article as I believe it essentially encapsulates the fundamental dilemma the PGP is facing—they are lying so there is no concise way for them to effectively persuade people they are right. 

Fortunately, there has at last been a bit of a pushback against this. In Allison Neitzel’s case because of her vitriol, she was served by the FLCCC’s lawyer to stop making her false and defamatory remarks, and after lawyering with a very expensive DC firm (which would be impossible for an unemployed MD graduate to afford—which again suggests she was working for a PR firm) was forced to delete her postings and issue a public apology (that is now pinned on her Twitter profile) which acknowledges she made numerous false statements and included this passage:

Note: as you can imagine, Neitzel’s tribe considered it abhorrent she was forced to do this and have vociferously complained about it. This also marks the third time the FLCCC has gotten these people to back down, which is wonderful because in the past they could act with impunity.

Conclusion

Because of how many times I’ve seen the pharmaceutical industry pull the same scam on the public (e.g., much of what happened with the COVID-19 vaccines was a repeat of what happened with HIV, HPV, and anthrax), I saw through the pandemic propaganda from the very start.Note: since PR uses a fairly consistent method to manipulate the audience once you become “immune” to it, all of it sounds very fake and it takes on the transparent quality I mentioned at the start of this article.

In turn, what was so depressing for me was how frequently I saw these scams work, and in each case, they increased a little bit from the previous one (the public had become acclimated to and hence did not question), so in turn, as the years went by, things became worse and worse.

However, during COVID, something very strange happened. Every single stop was pulled out, and give or take every PR thing that could be done (e.g., lots of sleazy promotions) was, and this continued even once it was clear a lot of people were being severely injured by them.

Note: to this day, we still don’t know what prompted everyone to go all in on promoting the vaccines. I’ve heard a lot of compelling theories (e.g., depopulation, to launch the mRNA industry, or a directive to change humanity’s DNA) but the honest truth is no one knows.

In my opinion, the biggest mistake that was made was the choice to mandate healthcare workers to get the vaccines (as they were the most likely to comply with vaccinating and were then used to create “trust” to sell the vaccines to everyone else). This is because many of them were injured by the vaccines, and hence became willing to start publicly questioning everything they had been told—which is a huge problem since the “public’s trust” of the medical system is built upon them listening to what doctors and nurses tell them.

Groups like Shots Heard are trying to correct this mistake after the fact, but I think what they are doing is an exercise in futility, as while they were able to ruin a few people’s lives, the truth was not on their side and the “nightmare scenario” they had predicted (the public turning against vaccination) is now happening. It’s possible if more money goes into the group, and they get more competent employees, they could make more of an impact, but at this point, public opinion has turned so much against them that I doubt this will work.

Instead, I and many others believe that if the medical establishment wants to regain the public’s trust, it needs to start being honest, stop misrepresenting its products, and trust the public to do what makes sense. Medicine does many critical and important things right, but if that gets blurred with unsafe and ineffective products being sold for unscrupulous reasons (e.g., greed), the whole sector will suffer.

My hope in turn has been that the public’s response to what they did during the pandemic will make that lesson clear to them (e.g., never pull anything like COVID-19 again because it will cost the industry a lot of money in the long term), but since human beings never want to let go of wealth or power, many in the medical and public health establishment have still not come to terms with the fact their way of doing things will no longer fly. For example, a lot of money has been invested in the “next pandemic” and the WHO has been aggressively pushing to legalize what they did during COVID for all future “emergencies” (however dedicated activists have so far been successful in derailing that disastrous treaty).Fortunately, while the stories in this article are heartbreaking, I actually view them as a positive because they show that the medical industrial complex’s power is actually quite limited and they simply can no longer compete in the era which has been made possible by the free diffusion of information on the internet. This likewise is why I avoided directly attacking most of the people who coordinated these attacks—as while they are horrible people, they are simply a symptom of the current era we are in and soon will be viewed in the same way the cultists from many other disastrous (and now widely reviled) social movements were.

In the second part of this series, I will discuss a key thing that jumped out at me from reviewing all the videos these people put together—the fact that many of these doctors insisted nothing could be done to treat COVID, even when it was a loved one who had a very preventable situation.

Finally: after publishing this article, I learned that TikTok recently began it’s own program to use AI to censor “harmful misinformation,” which suggests Team Halo’s work was successful.

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