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'Vaccination Demand Observatory' is using surveillance, bots, and 'behavior change' mass marketing schemes to press reluctant people into getting the shots
The U.S. is awash in a surplus of coronavirus vaccines as there has been a sudden in drop in demand for them; most Americans who want the shots have had them.
Now an army of Big Biotech's agencies set up to address "vaccine hesitancy" are turning up their mass marketing to "create demand" using,
...they've outlined in their playbooks.
About 40% of the total adult population has been fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Uptake plummeted 25% after a peak in mid-April, and 56.4% of adults have had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
But five million people - about eight per cent of those who took a first dose of the shot - failed to show up for their second dose appointments, according to the CDC.
As a result, excess vaccine stock has been piling up across the country. Chairs sat empty at a Philadelphia mass vaccination site where 4,000 unused doses of vaccines were due to expire.
A million doses, representing one out of every four sent to Louisiana by the federal government, were sitting on shelves.
One Wyoming county asked the state to stop shipping vaccines because it had a surplus of 20,000 shots; North Carolina closed its vaccination clinics for lack of demand.
Vaccine vs. virus fear
Numerous mainstream media fretted about "vaccine hesitancy," blaming it on,
No one mentioned that some people just don't think the vaccine works.
The mainstream media simply ignored Yale Professor of Epidemiology Harvey Risch, for example, who revealed that the majority of people now coming down with COVID-19 have been vaccinated against the virus.
Nor did they mention the leading reason for vaccine refusal cited by 45% of those in a March poll conducted by the Delphi Group for Facebook researchers, which is fear of side-effects, however.
With reported adverse events at 118,746 total in the U.S. alone, including 3,410 deaths and 1,595 permanent disabilities, it is a legitimate deterrent.
So is the abrupt halt of AstraZeneca's vaccine for its high rate of blood clots, and the pause of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine.
The leading reason for vaccine refusal cited by 45% of those in a March poll conducted by the Delphi Group for Facebook researchers is fear of side-effects.
With reported adverse events at 118,746 total in the U.S. alone, including 3,410 deaths and 1,595 permanent disabilities, it is a legitimate deterrent.
Many people simply fear the novel vaccine more than the novel virus which, according to the CDC, has an overall 99.4% survival rate for those aged 50-65 who get the infection.
The odds go up as people get older but decrease if people are younger.
For those under 18, the coronavirus fatality rate estimated by the CDC is 0.00002, which translates into a 99.98% COVID survival rate. In fact, for those under 18, the lifetime odds of being struck by lightning are higher than the odds of dying of the virus.
Nevertheless, President Joe Biden said Tuesday that now that the bulk of the vaccinated are seniors - 85% of whom have gotten at least their first vaccine dose - he wants 70% of all Americans to get their first dose by July 4.
He specifically pitched the jab to youths and announced his administration would be sending the vaccines to pediatricians to dole out over the coming weeks.
Vaccination Demand Observatory
Launched last week, the Observatory runs a "beta dashboard" of data and resources "intended for select global public health professionals."
The Observatory was established by a group called the Public Good Projects (PGP) which "designs and implements large-scale behavior change programs for the public good," UNICEF - which has received $86.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2020 - and the Gates-subsidized Yale Institute for Global Health.
PGP was founded by Joe Smyser, a public health academic who trained at the CDC and has partnered with Google and Facebook.
Its board members include executives from,
PGP's website says that through,
Bots - or internet robots, also known as crawlers - can scan content on WebPages all over the internet and create automated conversations and comments.
The supposed danger of the disease needs to be emphasized, because 'If people perceive that they are at low risk of contracting COVID-19, or that the consequences of becoming infected will not be severe, they will be less willing to get vaccinated.'
The group has promoted vaccines before.
It developed the #StopFlu campaign, recruiting 120 "'micro' social media influencers" in the "African American and Latinx communities across eight states" and giving them prompts to sell their audiences the ideas that flu is a serious problem and that healthy people need flu shots.
PGP's Observatory says it aims to,
Awash in Brave New World speak, the program's,
These would be "rapid field tested for tone, format and behavior change impact before being implemented."
In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) created a new public health field called "infodemiology",
PGP and UNICEF are leading the "Field Infodemiologist Training Program (FITP)" based in UNICEF country offices, government offices, and offices of other,
Big Biotech's global network
Among the huge network of organizations and programs involved in the vast mass marketing of vaccine demand - besides the WHO, CDC, UNICEF, PGP, and Yale - key orchestrators include:
Playbook rules
In the world of "infodemic management," one will inevitably come across the name of Jeff French, Professor at Brighton University and author of Strategic Social Marketing: For Behaviour and Social Change, whose text is referenced in most of the guides to mass marketing vaccines.
French published a paper in July 2020 with the pandemic just a few months underway and a vaccine reportedly still unavailable for years to come about "Pre-Emptive COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake Promotion Strategy."
His tips have evidently inspired much of the standard pandemic vaccine sell:
Behavior modification and operant conditioning techniques are a frequent theme of French's writings.
A 2014 paper he wrote for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control on vaccine uptake said,
A range of playbooks for public health agencies and "stakeholders" on strategies to make people take the shot follow on French's instructions.
The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a "technical advisory" on the heels of French's guidelines called Behavioral Considerations for Acceptance and Uptake of COVID-19 Vaccines in October, still two months before a shot was even available.
Some of its advice is sounding very familiar now:
'Field Guide'
UNICEF and PGP's Vaccine Misinformation Management Field Guide advises vaccine promoters to,
It's easy to find examples of French's operant psychology marketing methods being played out in the real world pandemic theatre.
One of its tactics is to badger people to accept vaccination as a "social norm."
Explain that "the majority of people adopt certain behavior and that is what others expect you to do to achieve a common good."
FHI 360 published its own "quickstart guide" on "Demand Creation and Advocacy for COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance and Uptake" advises governments to "establish a demand creation and advocacy task force" - something Biden did in March, setting aside $1.5 for a media vaccine advertising blitz.
FHI 360 also advises breaking people into,
Then, create,
'Carrot and stick'
It's easy to find examples of French's operant psychology marketing methods being played out in the real world pandemic theatre.
The mainstream media have evidently taken the point about "incentives and penalty interventions" on board and "herd immunity" is the new Holy Grail which all who are not reckless criminals should seek.
A full 26% of Americans said they would not take the vaccine, he said, but 44% of Republicans were resisting.
"Those folks jeopardize our ability to get to herd immunity faster," Smerconish claimed in disgust.
He quoted law professor Shanin Specter, who said,
The concept of "herd immunity" and how to get there is not settled science.
The Great Barrington Declaration, signed by more than 43,000 medical practitioners and 14,000 public health scientists and doctors, proposes that allowing natural immunity to spread while shielding those most vulnerable to COVID infection would be less harmful than blanket lockdowns.
Following infodemic guidelines, YouTube's medical misinformation policy expressly forbids any discussion of natural immunity in herd immunity on its platform.
Real world exercise
Emphasizing fear is a strategy employed frequently by experienced public health personnel, too.
Former CDC director Tom Frieden employed an offshoot of the "social norm" tactic along with "emphasizing disease danger" in a recent tweet which painted unvaccinated people as "infected" spreaders of supposedly deadly variants.
https://twitter.com/DrTomFrieden/status/1389993605100720128
Research like a recent study from the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University which found that new coronavirus variants are actually weaker than the original viral strain from Wuhan are to be ignored or treated as "misinformation."
Marketing schemes to recruit faith leaders have had success too, as vaccination drives have even moved inside mosques to convince skeptical Muslims to roll up their sleeves.
And Pope Francis has enthusiastically embraced the infodemic behavior change mission and is hosting a global public health vaccine promotion conference this week.
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