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The Vast Pharmaceutical Conspiracy to Silence Dissent Online
Millions of dollars were spent to weaponize the public against all of us
A Midwestern Doctor
Sep 25, 2024
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.
•Earlier this year we exposed them. Unfortunately, their abhorrent tactics continue and recently have been aimed towards Angela Wulbrecht RN because she advocated for a patient with a widely publicized vaccine injury.
Note: I posted an earlier version of this article six months ago. Due to recent events, I revised it and am re-releasing it.
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.
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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.
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:
“We’re going to have to rebuild, within this Wild, Wild West of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to,” “[T]here has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”
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 (?) 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 (?) 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 unfortunately was recently overturned by 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.
It's not [that] the left can't meme per say, it's that their viewpoints rely on a carefully constructed denial of reality, to a far greater extent than any of the cults or religions they seek to supplant. This doesn't lend itself to simple, easily conveyed messages, because if you rely on your viewers to see things as they are, without providing several layers of carefully selected context, they'll interpret it the wrong way. The left can't meme because memes are the antithesis of how they communicate.
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 (e.g., they always argued in bad faith and their only goal was to create a scene you were dragged into) 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 came out 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 rather than a right, 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 Forgotten Side of Medicine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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):
Stronger, a campaign run by Public Good Projects, a public health nonprofit specializing in large-scale media monitoring programs, regularly communicated with Twitter on regulating content related to the pandemic. The firm worked closely with the San Francisco social media giant to help develop bots to censor vaccine misinformation and, at times, sent direct requests to Twitter with lists of accounts to censor and verify.
Internal Twitter emails show regular correspondence between an account manager at Public Good Projects, and various Twitter officials, including Todd O’Boyle, [a] lobbyist with the company who served as a point of contact with the Biden administration. The content moderation requests were sent throughout 2021 and early 2022.
The entire campaign, newly available tax documents and other disclosures show, was entirely funded by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a vaccine industry lobbying group. BIO, which is financed by companies such as Moderna and Pfizer, provided Stronger with $1,275,000 in funding for the effort, which included tools for the public to flag content on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for moderation.
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:
I think it's changes in policies for the organizations that are credentialing bodies or ethical bodies for for medical practitioners. I do think you should have your license revoked if you're spreading disinformation. I think it's that bad.
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 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 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.
•Calling immigration services on Hispanic patients who received alternative COVID-19 care to try and get them deported.
•Falsely labeling vaccinated patients who were hospitalized as unvaccinated because they sought alternative COVID-19 care.
•Contacting the employers of dissident healthcare workers to try and get dirt on them.
•Repeatedly sending death threats to the homes of dissident healthcare workers.
•Getting dissident healthcare students 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 recently, capitulated to these dictates and began cracking down on “conspiracy theories”).
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:
Team Halo was as established as part of the United Nations Verified initiative in partnership with Purpose and the Vaccine Confidence Project at the University of London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and amongst other things, support is provided by the Rockefeller Foundation.
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.
Sirotek is the victim of ongoing harassment. She’s received pictures of her children posed in slaughterhouses and hanging from a noose, drive-by photos of her house, and letters with white powder that exploded upon opening.
The Nevada State Board of Nursing was inundated with calls for Sirotek’s professional demise and flooded with anonymous complaints.
These complaints trace back to Team Halo, a social media influencer campaign formed as part of the United Nations Verified initiative and the Vaccine Confidence Project.
In response, Sirotek filed a police report. Her lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter. The Epoch Times reviewed the documents.
The reply from the cease-and-desist letter? The client was acting within his First Amendment rights.
Sirotek’s testimony resulted in cheers, widespread attention, and a target on her back.
[The harassment] all started the day we got back from DC, And as more patients sought AFLN’s help, the attacks increased in frequency and force.
At first, Sirotek said the attacks appeared to come from random people. But as the attacks continued, the terms “Project Halo, “Team Halo,” and “#TeamHalo” continually cropped up. Especially on TikTok.
He kept targeting the Nevada State Board of Nursing because I was on the Practice Act Committee, and he did not feel like that was acceptable.”
Craig Perry, a lawyer representing nurses, including Sirotek, before the Nevada State Board of Nursing, confirmed Sirotek’s account. The executive director of the Nevada State Board of Nursing, Cathy Dinauer, declined to provide details on complaints or investigations, stating to The Epoch Times via email that they are “confidential.”
Sirotek said the complaints overwhelmed her ability to defend her nursing license.
Julia McCabe, a registered nurse and the director of advocacy services for AFLN, told The Epoch Times that initially, they tried kicking the trolls out of the outreach videos. But they couldn’t keep up with the overwhelming numbers and had to shut the videos down, usually after only 10 minutes, she said.
On June 5, 2022, @thatsassynp posted a video on TikTok calling for a “serious public uprising, because the Nevada State Board of Nursing and other regulatory agencies weren’t disciplining nurses for spreading “disinformation.
They cut off the pictures of my children’s faces from our family photos, where we take them every year on our front porch—we’ve got 11 years of those photos—and they cut them out and put them on the bodies of those little boys that have been sexually abused. And that’s what would get sent to my house. And I gave the police that.
In desperation, Sirotek asked Perry to file a legal name change, which he did on Sep. 15, 2022, hoping that would thwart people’s ability to look up Sirotek’s information.
“Usually, when you do a name change, it’s a public record. But under extenuating circumstances, you can have that sealed.” In Sirotek’s case, the court recognized the threat to her and her family’s safety, waived the publication requirement, granted the change, and sealed her record on Oct. 4, 2022.
In December 2022, @jesss2019 posted a video to TikTok doxing Sirotek by revealing her name change. The Epoch Times sought comment from @jesss2019 but has not received a response. After the request for comment, the user removed the video.
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:
An online archive shows Team Halo claimed “T.J. ‘Pax’ Hardy” was an epidemiologist and “educator for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment” on its site.
But in November 2022, Dr. Savannah Sparks, via her TikTok account rx0rcist, accused Pax of stealing the real Dr. Hardy’s credentials and passing them off as his own.
Pax denied the theft initially and claimed he would commit suicide because of Sparks’s allegations. Sparks received backlash from Pax’s followers. When the police got involved, Pax admitted he lied, was not a medical professional, and had engaged in behavior that resulted in the harassment of Sparks.
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 Neitzel 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). Astroturfing in turn helps to explain why people can be so “passionate” about a topic but simultaneously always argue in bad faith and completely unwilling to consider any alternative viewpoint as their basis for their position is it being their to job espouse it.
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). Likewise, Kamala Harris’s campaign is one of the most overt examples of astroturfing in history, as within a few weeks she went from being a fairly unpopular and relatively unknown politician to being hailed across every media platform as the most incredible presidential candidate in history (despite not having any policy positions or conducting any interviews), and in numeros cases, online influencers have come forward stating Kamala Harris’s campaign tried to bribe them for an endorsement.
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 (which is remarkable given that Neitzel’s “punishment” was inconsequential whereas what they put many healthcare workers through was horrendous and costly to defend against). 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.
Sociopathic Healthcare Workers
I have always been fascinated by the sociology of the medical profession, particularly because of how impactful it ends up being upon the rest of the country. One of its most distinctive characteristics is the strong herd mentality that exists within it (as so much of one’s medical training revolves around being punished for non-compliance—putting many in the position where they are unwilling to risk the position they’ve made a heavy investment to earn by questioning an existing medical dogma).
As a result, the medical profession has always been extremely resistant to important ideas that challenge a prevailing medical dogma (e.g., a doctor who proposed washing hands after dissecting corpses and before delivering babies to prevent mothers dying from sepsis was relentlessly attacked by his peers and eventually committed to an asylum where he was beaten by the guards and soon after died). In turn, I’ve lost count of how many critically important ideas have been relentlessly attacked by my colleagues (e.g., consider what we witnessed throughout COVID-19), and accepted that reasonable medical innovations typically will take decades to be adopted.
When dynamics like this exist, those groups tend to be remarkably vulnerable to being hijacked by radicals as the moderates in the group are unwilling to risk their social status by speaking out against them, and likewise, to campaigns (e.g., from a pharmaceutical company) being enacted which pay off key members of the group to promote a new dogma. In the case of medicine, this dynamic is particularly remarkable because a foundational dogma of medicine (which much of our social trust is based upon) is always doing what’s best for the patient, yet in countless instances, these other factors end up taking precedent over the Hippocratic Oath.
So for example, when the prelude to the COVID-19 vaccination campaign was conducted (pushing vaccine mandates California mothers were strongly opposed to due to a 2014-2015 measles outbreak), I noticed something quite extraordinary. Many of my colleagues became hateful and hostile towards the unvaccinated (e.g., gleefully wishing death on their children), including those who overtly professed the importance of treating patients as well as humanly possible (e.g., they were the types of people who would try to cancel a colleague for an inconsequential microaggression).
Note: measles outbreaks frequently are the result of vaccine shedding and often affect those who had already been vaccinated (e.g., consider the recent incident in Maine).
As a result, I was not at all surprised to see a far worse version of this manifest during COVID once the mainstream media egged the medical profession to weaponize against anyone who questioned the COVID cartels ridiculous health policies (e.g., I had numerous “progressive and tolerant” colleagues attack anyone who supported the use of hydroxychloroquine, wish death upon the unvaccinated and state their did not want to care for them if their poor decisions got them hospitalized).
Note: previously, I shared the testimony of James Miller MD, a gifted trauma surgeon who was cancelled by his Washington hospital and eventually forced to flee the state because he provided free care to unvaccinated patients the local medical system refused to care for (and witnessed instances where that denial of care led to the patient dying). Two of the key points his testimony highlighted was how easily his “rational” colleagues were swept into the COVID cult, and how much scorn they held towards the unvaccinated.
Worse still, in these dynamics, I often observe another unfortunate human behavior appear. In any population, a sociopathic subset always exists, and these individuals tend to latch onto whatever socially acceptable opportunity is presented that allows them to be cruel and hostile to others. In turn, from watching these attack groups, I’ve found the ones who tend to make the most noise about how egregious the anti-vaxxers are tend to also be the most lacking in basic humanistic qualities (e.g., empathy) and the most gleeful about hurting any of their political opponents. Furthermore, in each case where I am able to find out what they say in private (e.g., I know people who have spent time with Peter Hotez) I find what they say behind closed doors is much worse.
Un-Nurse Yourself
A large part of my motivation for the original version of this article (which went viral online) was to shame the people doing this enough that they would recognize it was in their best interests back off (e.g., we specifically avoided doxxing and hence naming the malignant doctors) and to make the medical boards aware of these frivolous complaints (which some of my colleagues are still dealing with).
This appears to have been successful, and (excluding a few outspoken physicians) they backed off—which may also have been due to the political climate changing and enough trust being lost in the medical profession that belligerent and condescending doctors weakened rather than increased the public’s trust in the medical system.
Recently, a public relations disaster happened for the vaccine injury—a young woman was clearly injured by a set of unwarranted vaccines that were mandated as a condition of care, and then gaslighted and abandoned once the injury set in (rather than being moved to the ICU)—send out a plea for help that lead to the story going viral and being seen by at least 100 million people.
Link to tweet.
When this started, Steve Kirsch immediately reached out to his physician network for advice and flew the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation’s nurse (Angela) to the hospital so Alexis could get the care she needed (as without an effective advocate, it was likely her injury would be fatal).
In turn, the vaccine lobby somewhat mobilized to oppose this (e.g., I saw a lot of people all using the phrase “ghoulish” to slander anyone advocating for Alexis and some of the smaller physician influencers try to elevate themselves by attacking Alexis and her advocates), but simultaneously, most of the larger parties stayed silent, presumably because they recognized demeaning her injury damaged their credibility.
However, in private, it was a bit different, and before long, our network was alerted to the fact two private facebook groups for pro-vax nurses were attempting to target Angela in retaliation for her advocating for Alexis. Because of this, a decision was made to pre-empt this by archiving the group (e.g., their members and postings) and then exposing them.
In turn, once we looked into the group, many of the same patterns we’d seen in the previously mentioned groups emerged. For example:
•Those nurses contemptfully wishing harm onto the unvaccinated.
•There were aghast that states had passed laws preventing “misinformation attacks” from revoking medical licenses.
•One of the group’s administrators having a rainbow circled woman holding her heart as her profile picture with the caption “I feel the power of Satan inside me.”
•Those nurses organizing campaigns to take away the medical licenses of other nurses who questioned the COVID narrative (which often were quite costly for the nurses who then had to defend their licenses) and showing no remorse for doing so while simultaneously asserting its not fair or acceptable members of the public are targeting them for their conduct.
•Those nurses discussing how annoying it was that a child with down syndrome accidentally asphyxiated themselves (requiring cardiac resuscitation to bring the child back) and 17 members of the group laughing at the fact the child’s pre-existing mental disability would make it unlikely anyone would notice the brain damage that occurred from cerebral blood being cut off during this incident.
Note: I deliberately avoided including screenshots or videos of what they said here but did include links to Tweets showing it.
When I reached out to Nicole for comment about this (as she has been continually harassed by these zealots) she stated:
I’m gravely concerned about the patient harm that is coming from these groups. I recently posted a video about a down syndrome baby that was harmed and it was posted about in the group Un-Nurse-Yourself and The Insensitive Nurse. They are openly stating they are discriminating against patients for their vaccination status and are actively applauding that people are dying when our very job and profession exists to help and save lives.
I’ve been stalked by Tyler Kuhk and Josephine Kracht for Team Halo for two years since speaking with Senator Ron Johnson, I’m not surprised at all that Tyler was in the UnNurse Yourself group attempting to take my license and created a Google doc to get information about me. I now suffer from PTSD because of their dangerous behaviors and no one should ever be afraid to save a patients life and suffer because of it I recommend everyone take a look at the videos of the dangers of these “healthcare heroes”
Being targeted because I wanted to help low-income and minority people not die during the pandemic, is what I am being attacked for. I have spent thousands of dollars protecting my nursing license because of these people. I recommend everyone follow my socials and view the videos of what is going on in these groups.
Note: Nicole posted significantly more information here (and can be followed here).
Lastly, there was one screenshot from the group that was shared with me I wanted to discuss:
I put a lot of time into this publication (which reciprocally has put strain on other aspects of my life and forced me to abandon things I previously prioritized), which I do this because:
•We are in a unique era when it’s critical to stand up to do the right thing.
•I really care about helping people and due to the size and trust of the readership I have here, I am able to make a much larger positive impact through writing than almost anything else I could be doing.
Because of this, a lot of what I write her is crafted in the manner I believe will most help people but I simultaneously continually regret falling short of what I want to do for everyone. One of the most common areas this happens in is when readers reach out to me asking for a directory they can look in to find an awake doctor. In turn, I have to decline that request because my colleagues (who all have full practices) have explicitly requested for me not to put them on a list that will guarantee their harassment (and likewise refuse to ever be entered into an online directory or have an internet presence). While this seems a bit over-the-top I am specifically sharing this screenshot to show there is a subset of the medical industry which is eager to do just that.
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Federal Govt. Whistleblower Exposes $347M Contract for Transporting Minors
