Communities have been, and continue to be, manipulated.
This likely won’t get better any time soon.
Public health isn’t about a niche group with special or secret practices, and community care shouldn’t be gate kept away from people who for whatever reason haven’t been afforded information or opportunity. But there seems to have been a concerted effort to “other” people who avoid getting sick, and even to get people to other themselves - by pushing the immunocompromised and the careful to the so-called fringe. People, support groups, or organizations formed around public health, disability, patient advocacy, and generally avoiding covid, are lambasted as somehow bad and strange, even though these are essentially the interests of most people.
Jay Bhattacharya, of Great Barrington Declaration fame, is Trump’s pick to lead the NIH. People are rightly concerned that he’s going to move us into a Dark Age by squelching research. But this is a person with designs on social engineering. He has signaled that he wants to make up the media landscape and the political landscape in his vision. (And probably that of the Brownstone Institute, which backs him with big money.)
Tweet by Number 99 @MmeBlackBalloon Aug 18, 2023 "Still COVIDing" regional FB groups use social media to enable intentional communities that sequester "clean" people from the rest of the current world. They have 10's of 1000's of members whose identities are based on social isolation & fear of disease as markers of status. IMAGE SCREENSHOTS OF FACEBOOK Still COVIDing, Bay Area Edition Private 1.2K members 10 posts a day This is a group for COVID conscious individuals and families in the San Fran... Join Still Coviding, Young Adults Edition Private 620 members-2 posts a day This is a space for young adults who are still taking Covid precautions to co... Join Still coviding: adapting to the new reality Private 1.3K members. 5 posts a day This is a group for those who are trying to stay safe but are a bit more 'out ther... Join Still Coviding, Still Trusting & Believing In God, in unbelie... Private 315 members 2 posts a day This group is a safe place for believers of God who are still taking precautions a.... Join. REPLY by Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya Aug 18, 2023 Meanwhile, at the command of the government, FB suppressed or eliminated vax injury groups, anti lockdown posts, and the GBD. REPLY by Number 99 @MmeBlackBalloon I wonder how much influence these kinds of people had on public policy and government perceptions of appropriate actions? Like very which came first, chicken or egg. Not that government don't always try to get away with censorship but having backing from masses helps. All bad. 1:13 AM 3 Aug 19, 2023 1,132 Views
The idea that Still Coviding Facebook groups had influence over public policy and government is laughable. I myself wrote 200 postcards to Biden in the last 4 years and almost nothing I wrote about was addressed, and none of my pandemic concerns were at all addressed. Joe Biden campaigned in 2020 on a robust pandemic response plan that was actually quite good. Once in office he and the Democrats who had defended the disabled and the high risk turned their backs on us and said: Return to Office butts in seats downtown for the economy. And the Biden administration pretty much embraced natural herd immunity, abandoned the pandemic measures he campaigned on, and additionally, under pressure from Republicans, the economic mitigation measures ended under Biden. I don’t know why they even needed Trump considering the Great Barrington Declaration has become the status quo of most nations frankly - except of course for the part where they “focus protection” on the vulnerable! That’s nowhere in sight as infants and the elderly have been totally hung out to dry along with the disabled high risk and immunocompromised.
MedPage Today - Nursing Homes Fell Behind on Vaccinating Patients for COVID — Billing complexities and patient skepticism partially to blame by Sarah Boden, KFF Health News December 5, 2024 Loveland has seen patients and coworkers at the nursing home where she works die from the viral disease. Now she has a new worry: bringing home the coronavirus and unwittingly infecting her infant daughter, Maya, born in May. Loveland's maternity leave ended in late June, when Maya wasn't yet 2 months old. Infants cannot be vaccinated against COVID until they are 6 months old. Children younger than that suffer the highest rates of hospitalization of any age group except people 75 or older. Between her patients' complex medical needs and their close proximity to one another, COVID continues to pose a grave threat to Loveland's nursing home -- and to the 15,000 other certified nursing homes in the U.S. where some 1.2 million people live. Despite this risk, a CDC report published in April found that just four in 10 nursing home residents in the U.S. received an updated COVID vaccine in the winter of 2023-24.
The truth is that the Pentagon under the Trump administration perpetrated an anti-vax propaganda campaign, and under Biden, that campaign continued for at least a while. But not only that, there was someone who I was shown evidence that they were listed as an NIH contractor in 2021 and who operated on social media as a pro-vax influencer who posted prolific amounts of dubious “vax, unmask, and relax” content - clearly going well beyond promoting vaccination, and actually to exist to calm nerves about going “back to normal” seemingly for the sake of The Economy, or perhaps to at least to calm the public to settle things down. They literally told people in April 2021 that it was absolutely impossible for vaccinated people to transmit the virus to each other, when no such evidence existed at that time nor since. When I say this influencer is prolific, people who analyzed the posts of this person’s social media account, told me that it appeared they were doing it as a full time job with overtime, or that the account was being staffed by multiple people in shifts. Today this influencer account can be found hyping (as if it’s just another exciting breakthrough), among other studies on covid remedies, a junk covid product that is being hyped by a number of other outlets in a PR blitz.
The point is that we’re living in The Internet of Fakes, and government entities and big industries are documented as having been known to hire operatives and provocateurs and even to infiltrate social groups.
But Jay Bhattacharya thought it was vulnerable people, often immunocompromised, who were “silencing” him, and this elite has silenced his way to the Trump administration. He’s entering the halls of power with his assertions that regular people just trying to survive are enemies trying to silence and take away power from Jay Bhattacharya. Even if it’s totally made up, or perhaps because it’s made up, this orientation around covid is so disturbing.
Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya Aug 18, 2023 “Meanwhile, at the command of the government, FB suppressed or eliminated vax injury groups, anti lockdown posts, and the GBD.” 9 replies, 41 retweets, 366 hearts, 12K views.
Considering that every accusation is a confession with these people, I think there’s good cause for concern.
Mother Jones - November 26, 2024 - He Rose to Fame as a Covid Contrarian, and Trump Wants Him to Be NIH Head - Jay Bhattacharya is outspoken about public health restrictions and sees censorship on social media. - Kiera Butler At a conference hosted by the anti-lockdown group the Brownstone Institute in November 2021, nearly a year after the rollout of the Covid vaccines, Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.”
We know that shadowbanning is indeed real. But ironically the people who complain the loudest are the biggest of hypocrites when it comes to the “free speech” issue. So what do you think Jay Bhattacharya intends to do with money he will have at the NIH to splash around to contractors who can hire influencers online?
Many pandemic related groups today are sadly largely places where the members are used as a captive audience of eyeballs given to vendors by admins who’ve consolidated power. They’re too often filled with MLM stuff and target marketing of pseudoscience covid products. People join groups for support and are offered opportunities to buy expensive products with no good evidence of safety or efficacy. People join advocacy groups thinking they’re getting involved in activism, only to find that they’re expected to hype someone’s project on social media, and help them gain attention to get funding from some cryptocurrency source or other. And that’s along with an endless parade of infiltration by trolls, operatives, reporters, scammers, spammers. And many already suspect the presence of state actors in these spaces. But these social groups form because people, especially people at high risk who must avoid infections, have sought out people in similar situations when their families and friends were convinced to abandon safety or any care or concern for the high risk, in order to prop up the economy - by both political parties and both the Trump and the Biden administrations - because both parties prioritize profits over people and businesses over constituents. The most vulnerable people are already extremely marginalized, and sometimes harassed. People avoiding covid have to avoid almost everything, especially in the winter. Online clubs are far from perfect, but the last thing we need is the further fringe-ifying of communities. Especially when social media seems as toxic as ever, and the same problems exist in all social media to some extent. Social media is a way to meet people, sure, in the same way you can meet new people in a tavern, but it’s an absolutely terrible place to try and maintain real connections or accomplish anything within that space. “Likes” are not substantial, let’s be honest. And now, lockdown revisionists and anti-vax posse vigilantes will target this population who has no defenders in positions of power, possibly with state sanctioned violence, or at best, be given a harder time than is already the case.
People talk about media and journalists “obeying in advance” nowadays, but if you care about having doctors mask and not spread their covid or flu to cancer patients, or even if you just care about vaccination - like me you’ve likely been seeing journalists obey in advance to authoritarianism for ages now. And probably also see tons of evidence people don’t even know that updated covid vaccines even exist.
lisa725 2d ago Tuesday, December 3, 2024 at 10:36:14 PM EST Honestly I had no idea there was one. Is it like the Flu shot now? My doctor didn't say anything about it at my annual. She asked about the flu shot. That's it. I have gotten the shot 4 times and I would get it again. Reply grulepper 2d ago. It's a yearly like the flu shot, odd your doc didn't bring it up. Reply Key-Wallaby-9276 22h ago My doc nor my kids doc did either Reply the-names-are-gone 16h ago Yeah it is odd that the medical professional with a decade of schooling and however many years of real world experience didn't see the need to ask
I’m concerned that this situation won’t be confined to making vaccines less available, or even outlawing them, as there has been talk of having county sheriffs deputize anti-vaxxers to do raids on public health officials and others. When people are given power of the state and a stamp of approval on going after enemies, it can coerce people to act improperly or invite opportunists. What’s going on is nothing to take lightly.
(crossposted from my substack)
