They asserted a certainty they never possessed, and they enforced it against your job. Every reckoning since has
landed on the surface. The machine underneath is still running. This is the record.
SIX FEET
In January 2024, in a transcribed interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Anthony Fauci was asked where the six-foot rule came from.
He said it sort of just appeared. The committee’s memorandum records that he could not identify the scientific evidence or the data used to establish it. The Subcommittee’s final report concluded that the requirement had been arbitrary and was not adequately grounded in science.
Consider what six feet governed. How many children fit in a classroom, and therefore whether the school opened at all. How many tables a restaurant could set, and therefore whether it survived. How many people could stand in a church. Whether a nursing home could let a daughter in. Whether you could sit at the bed of your dying father, or say goodbye to him through glass.
It sort of just appeared.
No one has apologized for it. Not the man who promoted it, not the agency that published it, not one of the hundreds of institutions that spent 2020 and 2021 telling you that anyone who questioned it was a danger to his neighbors.
THE PREMISE
On March 29, 2021, Rochelle Walensky appeared on MSNBC and told the country that the data from her agency suggested that vaccinated people do not carry the virus and do not get sick. She said it was not only in the clinical trials. She said it was in the real world data.
That was the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on national television, telling the American public that the vaccinated do not carry the virus.
Three days later her own agency took it back. A CDC spokesperson told the New York Times that Dr. Walensky had spoken broadly, that it was possible for fully vaccinated people to contract COVID-19, and that the evidence was not clear on whether they could spread it to others. The agency said it was continuing to evaluate the evidence.
Set those two statements side by side. On March 29 the Director said the vaccinated do not carry the virus. On April 1 the agency said the evidence was not clear. Not that the claim had been overtaken by events. Not that the science had changed. That the evidence was not clear, and had not been clear, on the day she said it. The agency established this within seventy-two hours, and it delivered the correction to a newspaper rather than to the country.
The country never heard the correction. The country heard the assertion, and the country was governed by it.
On July 21, 2021, at a CNN town hall in Cincinnati, the President of the United States told an audience that the vaccines covered the Delta variant, that they were okay, and that they were not going to get COVID if they had these vaccinations. He said it flatly and without qualification. Four fact-checking organizations corrected him within two days. His press secretary was asked to walk it back the following afternoon. He did not withdraw it.
There is a reason no one could produce the evidence for the claim.
On October 10, 2022, Janine Small, Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, appeared before the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic. Rob Roos, a Dutch member of the Parliament, asked her whether the vaccine had been tested for its effect on transmission before it entered the market. He asked for a straight answer, yes or no.
She said no. She said the company had to move at the speed of science.
The exchange traveled quickly, and the fact-checking organizations moved to contain it. Their answer was that this was neither news nor a scandal, because Pfizer’s trial had always been designed to measure symptomatic disease, and the company had never claimed to have transmission data, and the protocol had been public since November 2020.
They were right. That is the point. The defense and the indictment are the same sentence. The manufacturer did not test it. The manufacturer did not claim it. The protocol said so in writing, in public, before a single dose was administered. And the Director of the CDC went on television in March of 2021 and told the country that the vaccinated do not carry the virus, and the President went on television in July of 2021 and told the country they would not get it, and in September of 2021 the federal government built an enforcement apparatus on a proposition that no trial had tested and no manufacturer had asserted.
The certainty was announced. It was never possessed. And by the time anyone said so on the record, under questioning, in a chamber, the jobs were already gone.
THEY’RE KILLING PEOPLE
On July 16, 2021, Rochelle Walensky stood at a podium and said that this was becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The same day, on the White House lawn, President Biden was asked what he would say to the social media platforms carrying doubt about the vaccines. He said they were killing people.
Killing people. That is the President of the United States, describing his own citizens.
On August 5, 2021, twenty days later, Dr. Walensky sat with Wolf Blitzer on CNN and said that the vaccines still worked against severe illness and death, and that what they could no longer do was prevent transmission.
Understand what she had just withdrawn. The entire moral architecture rested on transmission. Get vaccinated to protect the people around you. Take it for your grandmother. The unvaccinated are a danger to the rest of us. That was the premise of the mandates, the passports, the exclusions, the firings, and of every family argument that never healed.
On September 9, 2021, five weeks after his own CDC director had amended that premise on national television, the President of the United States addressed the nation to announce federal vaccination requirements. The official transcript is on the record and may be read by anyone. This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. That twenty-five percent can cause a lot of damage, and they are. He announced a plan to require more Americans to be vaccinated, in his words, to combat those blocking public health.
The charge was not softened when the premise beneath it was withdrawn. It was hardened, and it was signed that afternoon.
In December he was still telling Americans to get vaccinated so that they would not spread the disease to anyone else.
Thirteen days after Dr. Walensky’s revision, Pope Francis appeared in a vaccine advertisement, and the campaign kept expanding.
It did not slow. It did not correct. It scaled.
THE PEOPLE WHO LOST THE WORK
On September 9, 2021, the same day as the address, the President signed two executive orders. Executive Order 14043 required vaccination for federal employees. Executive Order 14042 required federal contractors and subcontractors to comply with federal COVID safety protocols, which in practice meant the same thing, across the whole contracting economy. The speech and the instrument carry one date. He announced the requirement and he signed it the same afternoon.
Sixteen days earlier, on August 24, 2021, the Secretary of Defense had ordered every member of the armed forces to be vaccinated. On November 5, 2021, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published an interim final rule requiring vaccination for staff at every facility that accepts Medicare or Medicaid, which is nearly every hospital and nursing home in the United States. The rule reached employees, volunteers, contractors, students, and trainees, including those who never came within a corridor of a patient.
Four instruments. The federal workforce. The federal contracting economy. The armed forces. American healthcare.
Now read how each one ended.
Executive Orders 14042 and 14043 were revoked by Executive Order 14099, signed May 9, 2023 and effective three days later. Read Section 1. The President wrote that he had issued the original orders based on the best available data and the guidance of public health experts, that Delta had been the predominant variant, and that the orders had been necessary. Then he wrote that deaths had declined by ninety-three percent and hospitalizations by eighty-six percent, and that a government-wide vaccination requirement was therefore no longer needed.
No longer needed. Not unjustified. Not mistaken. The document reaffirms the original judgment in the act of terminating it, and it is the government’s own drafting.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published its withdrawal on June 5, 2023. The agency wrote that the risks targeted by the staff vaccination rule had been largely addressed. It went on encouraging vaccination through quality reporting and value-based incentive programs. It made no finding that the rule had been wrong. It found that the risks were addressed.
The military mandate was not withdrawn by the Department of Defense. It was killed by Congress. Section 525 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, signed December 23, 2022, directed the Secretary of Defense to rescind the mandate within thirty days. He complied on January 10, 2023. He reached no conclusion about whether it had been right. He was ordered by statute to end it, and he ended it.
Roughly eight thousand service members had been involuntarily separated. The same statute that ended the mandate contained no back pay, no reinstatement, and no restoration of rank. Senators who sought those provisions could not get them into the bill. A soldier discharged for refusing the vaccine was left to petition a Board for Correction of Military Records, one man at a time, as a private applicant, against the institution that had discharged him.
Hollywood’s return-to-work system was negotiated jointly by the Directors Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, the Teamsters, the Basic Crafts, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. After vaccines became available, the agreements permitted employers to require that workers in the highest-risk production zone remain up to date on vaccination, boosters included. The protocols were extended, and extended again, and expired in May 2023.
No finding was ever issued that the vaccination conditions had been unjustified. I have found no public record that the industry undertook any program of reinstatement or compensation for the workers excluded under these protocols, and I have found no statement from any guild or from the employers’ alliance acknowledging that the conditions were wrong. The rules lapsed the way a subscription lapses, and the industry moved on to the next season.
The unions that exist to protect working people negotiated the terms on which working people would be excluded, and when the terms were no longer defensible they let them run out rather than say they had been wrong.
Four mandates. Four terminations. Not one finding, in any of the four, that the requirement had been unsound. In every case the instrument was retired on the ground that the emergency had passed, and that formulation preserves the original judgment perfectly intact while foreclosing forever the question of whether it was ever justified at all.
They were not repudiated. They expired.
WHILE THEY WERE ASKING YOU TO TRUST THEM
In September 2020 the Food and Drug Administration awarded a contract worth nearly fifteen million dollars to a consulting firm called Atlas Research. The work was to produce public service announcements pairing entertainers with public health officials. To choose the entertainers, Atlas built a file.
It was called the PSA Celebrity Tracker. There were two hundred and seventy-four names in it. Against each name the contractor recorded which segment of the population that person appealed to, the person’s political leanings, and the person’s arrest history, drinking or drug problems, and any sexual misconduct. Julianne Moore was listed as pending, and annotated as a liberal Democrat who supported abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and gun control.
They were actors and singers and athletes. Private citizens. They had committed no offense except fame, and they did not know the file existed. It was compiled with money that Congress had appropriated for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, moved by interagency agreement to the press office running the campaign, so that the government could decide which Americans it would pay to speak to the other Americans.
On October 29, 2020, three House committees released the tracker and wrote to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The press followed. The Secretary convened a review. In November the Food and Drug Administration terminated the Atlas contract. That is the one time in this account that an American institution stopped something before it had run its course.
Now read what it stopped.
The same solicitation had produced a second award, sixteen times larger. In September 2020 the National Institutes of Health gave two hundred and fifty million dollars to a behavioral research firm called Fors Marsh Group, which designed the campaign, its messaging, and its name. Fors Marsh had nothing to do with the celebrity file. Its chief executive said so on the record at the time, and said the firm had never had contact with the political appointees at the department. Nothing I have found contradicts him.
That is the point, and it should be sat with. Atlas had fifteen million dollars and the embarrassment, and Atlas was ended. Fors Marsh had two hundred and fifty million dollars and the architecture, and Fors Marsh stayed. The auditors would record it in a single sentence: Fors Marsh Group has continued to work on the campaign.
The file was built in the autumn of 2020, under one administration. The campaign it was built to serve was inherited by the next, and scaled, and run for three more years, and the contractor was never changed. Neither administration ended it. One of them cut the part that could be photographed.
The visible thing was cut. The structural thing was kept.
The Government Accountability Office published its account of all of it on March 29, 2022. Atlas told the auditors that the vetting elements had come from work a subcontractor had done for other clients, and that the final selection of celebrities turned on which audience was being targeted and not on political support or affiliation. That answer is printed in the report and it should be weighed. What is not in dispute is that the file was built, that the government paid for it, and that the Americans named in it were never told.
Nobody was fired. GAO recommended no action of any kind. The report closes by noting that the auditors sent a draft to the department for review, and the department stated that it appreciated the opportunity to review it, and had no comments.
THE MACHINE THAT TOLD YOU
The scale of what was built to persuade you is not in dispute, because the people who built it published it.
The Ad Council was created during the Second World War to place the advertising industry at the service of the war effort, and it was never afterward dissolved. In the 1950s it ran the national campaign for the polio vaccine, with Elvis Presley and Ella Fitzgerald and the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Roy Campanella on the new television networks. In 2020 it took the assignment again. Together with an outfit called COVID Collaborative, founded by John Bridgeland, it raised roughly fifty-two million dollars and assembled more than three hundred institutions behind a single campaign, describing them, in its own materials, as trusted messengers. Amazon. Apple. Google and YouTube. Facebook and Instagram. Walmart. Walgreens. JPMorgan Chase. Ford. Disney, across ABC and ESPN and Hulu. The NAACP. The Business Roundtable. A National Faith Steering Committee to reach the churches. Willie Nelson recording with thirteen sports leagues. Four living former presidents and four former first ladies. Pope Francis, produced with the Vatican.
By the summer of 2021 more than three quarters of vaccine-eligible Americans had seen one of the advertisements. The campaign had engaged more than a thousand influencers and had taken in over two hundred million dollars in donated media.
Two campaigns were running, and they were not the same thing. The Ad Council and COVID Collaborative ran the private one. It was called It’s Up To You, and it was financed by donations and donated airtime. The Department of Health and Human Services ran the federal one. It was called We Can Do This, it was financed by an appropriation, and it was executed by a contractor. The two were not rivals and they were not strangers. They pointed the public to the same website. And in the Ad Council’s own press release, this: the CDC brand appeared on select creative assets, and the CDC, along with the Department of Health and Human Services, provided scientific guidance on all aspects of the campaign.
The government did not have to compel the private campaign. It guided it, branded it, and let it run on somebody else’s money. The citizen who wanted to know how his own government had spoken to him was left holding a press release instead of a contract.
In June 2021 the Ad Council convened, with Variety, a room of Hollywood writers and producers, to help them work vaccine storylines into the shows you were already watching.
An advertisement admits what it is. A storyline does not. When a character you have followed for years arrives at a conclusion inside a plot you are invested in, you do not experience persuasion. You experience agreement with yourself.
Three hundred corporations, the churches, the sports leagues, the writers’ rooms, the papacy, and the federal government, reaching three quarters of the country in ninety days.
That apparatus has never spent one dollar telling you what changed.
NO FORUM
Some of this was litigated. What the litigation established is nothing, and the way it established nothing is the most important thing in this record.
In May 2022 the states of Missouri and Louisiana, together with several private citizens whose posts had been removed, sued federal officials for pressuring the social media platforms to suppress speech about COVID-19. Discovery produced a factual record exceeding twenty-six thousand pages. In July 2023 the district court found that officials at the White House, the Surgeon General’s office, the CDC, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had likely coerced or significantly encouraged the platforms. The Fifth Circuit affirmed in substantial part.
On June 26, 2024, the Supreme Court reversed, six to three. Justice Barrett’s opinion begins and ends with standing. The plaintiffs could not trace the removal of any particular post to the conduct of any particular official, because the platforms had been moderating that category of speech before the government ever called, and so the plaintiffs could not show that an injunction would change anything at all.
The Court did not reach the First Amendment question. It did not hold that the conduct was lawful. It held that these citizens, on this record, could not be heard. Justice Barrett also found that the courts below had read the evidentiary record erroneously, and that finding belongs here, stated plainly, because this argument does not need any help. The district court’s account of what the government did was not adopted by anyone above it.
What survives is the shape of the thing. The federal government spent a year in sustained contact with the platforms about what Americans were permitted to say to one another. Twenty-six thousand pages of that contact reached the Supreme Court of the United States. And the case ended because the citizens whose speech came down could not prove which particular hand had taken it down.
That is not a loophole in the system. That is the system. A citizen can prove that an agency issued a rule. He cannot prove that a partnership produced a takedown.
THE GRADE
It is tempting to say that no one ever looked back. What happened is worse.
On May 6, 2024, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine published a benefit-cost analysis of the federal vaccine campaign. Read the affiliations. The two first authors are staff of Fors Marsh, the contractor that ran the campaign under a quarter of a billion dollars in federal award. Their coauthors are drawn from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, which is the office that commissioned it, and from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. The firm that was paid to do the persuading and the office that paid for it share a byline on the grade.
The grade was as follows. Between April 2021 and March 2022 the campaign had produced $740.2 billion in benefits to American society against costs of $8.3 billion, for net benefits of approximately $732 billion. For every dollar spent, the authors reported, the return was eighty-nine dollars and fifty-four cents.
Read the denominator. The $8.3 billion is not what the campaign spent on itself. It is the campaign’s paid media expenditure plus the cost of administering the vaccinations that the authors attribute to the campaign. The advertising is credited with the benefit of the shots and charged with the cost of them, and that arrangement is what produces the ratio, and the department put the ratio in a press release the same day. The firm posted that the evaluation results kept coming and told a similar story.
Then set the denominator against the campaign. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which investigated the campaign for eighteen months, put its cost at more than nine hundred million dollars. The denominator in the vendor’s own study is $8.3 billion. Almost none of what the study charged to the campaign was ever spent by the campaign.
There has been a reckoning. The vendor conducted it. The agency that hired the vendor announced it. The verdict was eighty-nine dollars on the dollar.
The study does not examine the file of two hundred and fifty names. It does not examine the six-foot rule that sort of just appeared. It does not examine the transmission claim asserted in March 2021 and revised in August 2021, or the four mandates that rested upon it. It does not examine one single American who was disbelieved, suspended, or removed from a job for doubting a message that the government itself later amended.
THE WORD
People ask whether they were lied to, and I understand the question, and I will not use the word, because a lie requires proving what a man knew when he said it, and that is the one thing the record does not hand us. It is also the only ground on which they can win.
What the record hands us is heavier.
They asserted certainty they did not possess. They enforced it against people’s livelihoods, their schooling, their worship, and their families. When it could no longer be held, they revised the guidance quietly, in technical documents, addressed to people already paying attention. And the only accounting of what it was worth was written by the contractor who was paid to do the persuading.
A lie is something a person does, and a person can be fired for it. This was something a system did, and the system is still running, and nobody has been asked a question.
There is no defense against a man saying, under oath, that a rule which closed the schools sort of just appeared.
WHAT IS OWED
Not one apology from the agency. Not one corrected advertisement. Not one restored job. Not one dollar of the two hundred million in donated media redirected to telling you what changed. Not one of the thousand influencers reassigned. No coalition of Amazon and Disney and the NAACP and the Vatican reconvened to explain the revision, though they reconvened readily enough to deliver the original.
Two documents come close to findings. Both should be raised, both should be read, and their existence should be stated plainly by anyone who wants to be believed about the rest.
On October 23, 2024, the majority of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce published the result of an investigation into the campaign that it had opened in April 2023. The committee found that the CDC guidance on which the campaign relied had gone beyond the terms of the FDA’s emergency use authorization to assert, without evidence, that the vaccines were highly effective against transmission. That is the claim of March 2021. That is the premise beneath the four mandates. A committee of the Congress of the United States has now written it down.
Now consider what it is. It is a staff report of the majority of one committee of one house, published eleven days before a national election, by the party that had been out of power the entire time the conduct occurred. It issued recommendations. It restored no one. It compelled no one to answer. Congress should consider. The department should abide. The agencies should embrace a culture of transparency and accountability. Should. The vendor kept the money.
On January 27, 2025, a new President signed an order finding that the military vaccine mandate had been an unfair, overbroad, and completely unnecessary burden on service members, that the military had unjustly discharged those who refused it, and that federal redress of wrongful dismissals was overdue. It directed reinstatement with back pay.
Now consider what that is. It came four years late, after an election. It came from the White House and not from the Department of Defense, which discharged those men and has never concluded that it was wrong to do so. It reached the eight thousand and it reached no one else. Not the nurse. Not the grip. Not the contractor. And it can be revoked by the next President with a pen, precisely as it was written with one.
Two findings. Both from the opposition. One timed to an election and one delivered by the winner of it. Neither issued by the institution that did the thing.
Redress that arrives only when the other party wins is not an institutional reckoning. It is a spoil of office. The institutions that built the apparatus have said nothing, and they have not been asked to, and a remedy that depends on who holds the White House is not accountability. It is the absence of accountability, wearing a signature.
The institutions did not conceal any of this. That is what should trouble you most. The Ad Council published its partner list and celebrates the campaign to this day. Fors Marsh published its own grade. The guilds published their protocols. The executive orders are in the Federal Register and the withdrawals are in the Federal Register beside them. Everyone said out loud what they were doing, and it looked, from the inside and at every single step, like decent people responding sensibly to a crisis.
The modern world was not built through invasion. It was built through infiltration.
Somewhere there is a file with more than two hundred and fifty American names in it, annotated with arrests and party registration. It belongs to the United States government. A citizen may still ask for it, because it was bought with an appropriation and it left a paper trail.
Nothing that replaced it can be asked for at all.
An auditor may read an award file. A committee may subpoena a contract. A citizen may write to an agency and receive an answer. Not one of those instruments reaches a partnership, a donated advertisement, a convened writers’ room, or a storyline. The Supreme Court has now confirmed, in the most expensive way available, that a citizen cannot reach them either.
They are not going to apologize. They have already rendered their verdict, and it was eighty-nine dollars on the dollar, and the only thing left to do is to write down what happened while the documents are still there to be read.
Liberty. Transparency. Truth. Justice.
—Mel K
A NOTE ON SOURCES
Dr. Fauci on the six-foot rule: House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic transcribed interview (January 2024), the committee’s accompanying memorandum, and the Subcommittee’s final report.
The transmission claim asserted: Dr. Walensky, MSNBC, March 29, 2021; the CDC spokesperson’s correction to the New York Times, April 1, 2021. President Biden, CNN town hall, Cincinnati, July 21, 2021, with contemporaneous corrections by PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, CNN, and Snopes, and the White House press secretary’s clarification of July 22. Pfizer on pre-market transmission testing: Janine Small before the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic, October 10, 2022, questioned by MEP Rob Roos; see also FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, which correctly note that Pfizer’s Phase 1/2/3 protocol (November 2020) was designed to measure symptomatic disease and that the company never claimed transmission data.
The transmission claim withdrawn: Dr. Walensky, CNN, August 5, 2021, with the network’s subsequent clarification that she was describing breakthrough infections in the fully vaccinated. “Pandemic of the unvaccinated”: CDC press briefing, July 16, 2021. President Biden on the social media platforms: remarks to reporters, July 16, 2021. The September address: Remarks by President Biden on Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic, official White House transcript, September 9, 2021.
The mandates: Executive Order 14042 and Executive Order 14043, both September 9, 2021; Secretary of Defense memorandum, August 24, 2021; CMS Omnibus COVID-19 Health Care Staff Vaccination interim final rule, November 5, 2021, upheld in Biden v. Missouri, January 13, 2022. The terminations: Executive Order 14099, May 9, 2023, effective May 12, 2023; CMS final rule, Federal Register, June 5, 2023, effective August 4, 2023; Section 525 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, signed December 23, 2022, and the Secretary of Defense rescission memorandum of January 10, 2023. Separation figures: Department of Defense reporting, approximately eight thousand involuntary separations.
Hollywood protocols: The Safe Way Forward and successor return-to-work agreements among the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, the Teamsters, the Basic Crafts, and the AMPTP (2020 to May 2023).
The file: the PSA Celebrity Tracker, an internal Department of Health and Human Services document dated October 23, 2020, produced by Atlas Research and released publicly on October 29, 2020 by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, and the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, together with those committees’ letter of the same date to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The tracker records two hundred and seventy-four names with their audience segments, political leanings, arrest histories, drinking or drug problems, and instances of sexual misconduct. Earlier committee correspondence to the Secretary is dated September 10 and October 28, 2020.
The awards, the termination, and the funding: Government Accountability Office, COVID-19: Information on HHS’s Public Education Campaign, GAO-22-104724 (March 29, 2022). GAO reports the nearly fifteen million dollar FDA contract to Atlas Research (September 2020); the two hundred and fifty million dollar NIH award to Fors Marsh Group (September 2020), which designed the campaign’s theme and logo; the three hundred million dollar interagency agreement between CDC and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, initially drawn from CARES Act and Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act funds and subsequently adjusted, on the department’s own account, to draw only on CARES Act funds; the convening of an HHS review in October 2020 and the FDA’s termination of the Atlas contract in November 2020; Atlas Research’s statement to the auditors that celebrity selection was based on the audience targeted and not on political support or affiliation; the continuation of Fors Marsh Group’s work on the campaign; the absence of any GAO recommendation; and the department’s response that it appreciated the opportunity to review the draft and had no comments. Fors Marsh Group’s chief executive stated publicly in October 2020 that the firm had not been involved in the vetting of celebrities and had not had contact with the department’s political appointees.
Campaign scale, partner roster, faith steering committee, reach, donated media, influencer totals, the Variety writers convening, and CDC and HHS participation in the Ad Council and COVID Collaborative campaign (It’s Up To You): Ad Council and COVID Collaborative press releases and campaign retrospective (February 25, 2021; June 2021; August 18, 2021; October 2021). The federal campaign (We Can Do This) was a separate, appropriated effort of the Department of Health and Human Services, executed by Fors Marsh and launched in April 2021; both campaigns directed the public to GetVaccineAnswers.org.
The litigation: Missouri v. Biden, W.D. La., preliminary injunction of July 4, 2023; Fifth Circuit, 2023; Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43, decided June 26, 2024, Barrett, J., six to three, on Article III standing, with Alito, J., dissenting, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, JJ.
Campaign benefits, costs, and return on investment: Sidney Turner, Elissa C. Kranzler, et al., “Benefit-Cost Analysis of the HHS COVID-19 Campaign: April 2021 to March 2022,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 67, no. 2 (August 2024): 258 to 264, published online May 6, 2024. Total campaign benefit $740.2 billion; campaign and vaccination costs $8.3 billion; net benefits approximately $732.0 billion; approximately $89.54 in benefits per dollar spent. The published methods state that costs were estimated using campaign paid media expenditures and corresponding vaccination costs. Authorship includes Fors Marsh staff and personnel of the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. See also the HHS press release of the same date.
The congressional finding and the campaign cost: House Committee on Energy and Commerce, majority staff report on the HHS COVID-19 public relations campaign (We Can Do This), released October 23, 2024, together with the Committee’s accompanying press release of the same date, which places the campaign’s cost at more than nine hundred million dollars and states the Committee’s finding that CDC guidance relied upon by the campaign went beyond the terms of the FDA’s emergency use authorization in asserting, without evidence, that the vaccines were highly effective against transmission. The investigation was opened in April 2023.
The 2025 order: Executive Order, Reinstating Service Members Discharged Under the Military’s COVID-19 Vaccination Mandate, January 27, 2025.
