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March 29, 2022 - Epoch Times
21:26
Federal Govt Paid 100+ Media Outlets to Advertise Vaccines, Coinciding With Positive Stories: Docs
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This is your daily Facts Matter update, and I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times.
And now let's begin today's discussion over in Florida, which has just become officially the first state in the entire nation to actually recommend against having healthy children get the COVID vaccine.
Now, before we move on with the actual discussion, I have to almost unbelievably preface it by saying that I'm just reporting the news, and I'm telling you what is happening over in Florida.
As a reporter, I do not have the luxury of an opinion.
I'm instead just reporting the facts, and then you can use the facts for yourself to decide what you believe, and you can make up your own mind.
And so, if you happen to be a 20-year-old latte-sipping YouTube censor who is reviewing this episode, well, please know that if you censor us, then you are directly censoring the facts themselves, because I don't offer any opinions on this program.
Now, two days ago, Dr.
Joseph Ladapo, who is Florida's Surgeon General, during a roundtable discussion with other officials in the state of Florida, here's specifically what he said regarding the new guidance.
Quote, It's going to be the first State Department to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children.
And then, shortly after Dr.
Ladapo made his announcement, Governor Ron DeSantis, he came up to the podium and he said that this new guidance, quote, crystallized a lot of things that we've seen, including a failure to weigh costs and benefits, whether that's lockdowns, whether that's school closures, or whether that's even something about whether a healthy seven-year-old kid should get the COVID vaccine.
Now, what's interesting to note is that this roundtable discussion, along with the announcement of the new Florida guidance, it came just a few days after three new studies were published, which once again brought to light the question of whether children should be getting vaccinated or not.
For instance, in one of those three studies, researchers with the New York State Department of Health, they found that Pfizer's COVID vaccine was not effective at preventing infection among children aged 5 to 11.
Specifically, after crunching all the data from the databases of three different states, these researchers found that Pfizer's vaccine dropped from being 68% effective in mid-December of last year, of December of 2021, to just 12% effective in the last week of January.
Now, those numbers were in regards to infection.
But then likewise, their data also showed that the protection against severe disease plummeted as well, going from 100% in mid-December to only 48% in late January.
Here was the conclusion from the researchers from that particular study.
Quote, In the Omicron era, the effectiveness against cases of the Pfizer vaccine declined rapidly for children, particularly those 5 to 11 years.
Then, you also had Dr.
Tracy Hogue, who is an epidemiologist and who's also been working on a study comparing the risks and benefits of vaccinating adolescents.
And she said that the recent data which has been coming out actually undermined the arguments for vaccinating children.
Here's specifically what she said.
We need to make sure that we're not doing an overall harm by vaccinating children when we don't know if there's a benefit.
And we have this known safety signal, which we analyzed in our paper, which is myocarditis in boys, especially more than girls.
It also exists in girls and young men.
And so even for boys who are previously healthy, who haven't been previously infected, we didn't find that there was a benefit.
There was actually overall risk of giving them the second dose.
And so these are the types of analyses that we need to do in a rigorous manner And until we know the answer to this, and until we're sure that we're not overall doing more harm than good, we need to be able to give parents and children the choice about whether or not they should be vaccinated.
However, it is really worth noting that the scientific method can sometimes be messy, and the data, it can be interpreted in many different ways.
And so, you also have scientists who lean in the other direction, who look at this data and say that despite the waning efficacy and the potential for side effects, the benefits still outweigh the risks.
For instance, here's what Dr.
Dr. Chandi John, who is an immunologist over at Indiana University School of Medicine, here's what he told us here at the Epoch Times via email.
Quote, As parents are considering vaccination, the results that show some evidence of protection against hospitalization are enough to convince me that vaccination in this age group is still appropriate with the current vaccine.
And it appears that the CDC's official position is actually the same.
Because after Florida made their announcement, we here at the Epoch Times, we reached out to the CDC, but they declined to give us a comment.
And instead, they just pointed us to their current recommendation over on their website, which says essentially that all children above the age of five should get the Pfizer vaccine and that children above the age of 12 should get an additional booster shot as well because of the vaccine's waning effectiveness.
Now, what's really interesting in all this, at least to me, is that amidst this situation where you have scientists disagreeing on what the data actually means, well, we are reminded of how this country actually works.
Because America is set up as a constitutional republic wherein representatives who are elected by you and me, by the people, make the actual decisions.
It's not the so-called experts who are supposed to be calling the shots.
I mean, of course, the experts, the scientists, the doctors, and the technical personnel, they are supposed to provide advice to the lawmakers, but it's the lawmakers who decide on public policy.
And Florida, they decided to recommend strongly against vaccinating children.
In fact, one day after the Surgeon General made that announcement, the new guidance was officially posted on the Florida Department of Public Health's website.
You can see it up on screen for yourself.
It's titled Guidance for Pediatric COVID-19 Vaccines.
And in the new guidance, Florida Surgeon General, he references how many children across the entire country have contracted COVID and then recovered, meaning that they have some level of natural immunity, and that according to many studies, having natural immunity is very effective.
Then, the guidance goes on to say this, quote,"...in general, healthy children with no significant underlying health conditions under 16 years old are at little to no risk of severe illness complications from COVID-19.
For adolescents 16 to 17 years of age, the risk of myocarditis due to the COVID-19 vaccines may outweigh the benefits." And then in a follow-up statement, Dr.
Ladapo, who is again Florida's Surgeon General, he said this.
Healthcare practitioners need to analyze existing data on the COVID-19 vaccine alongside parents when deciding to vaccinate children.
Based on currently available data, the risks of administering COVID-19 vaccination among healthy children may outweigh the benefits.
That is why these decisions should be made on an individual basis and never mandated.
Now, there is something else that happened here after this guidance was released that you can say was quite interesting and worthy of discussion.
Because what happened was that the White House, they came out and they attacked Florida's new policy as being absolutely no good.
Here's specifically what Jen Psaki said during a news briefing just two days ago.
It's deeply disturbing that there are politicians peddling conspiracy theories out there and casting doubt on vaccinations when it is our best tool against the virus.
Now, that reaction was generally to be expected.
But what's interesting is that when you search for news regarding this new guidance over in Florida, well, you predominantly find negative press, which echoes the view of the White House.
Story after story, you have many news outlets, even within straight news pieces, say that this was a bad idea.
Now, you might look at that and you might think that these news outlets might just have the same interpretation as the White House, which very well might be the case.
But there is something else of great importance that I believe is worth mentioning as well.
And that is, according to documents which were obtained by the Blaze through a Freedom of Information Act request, they found that hundreds of news organizations throughout the country, they have been paid by the federal government to advertise the vaccine as part of a quote-unquote comprehensive media campaign from the Department of Health and Human Services.
And it appears that their spending was not limited to only clearly defined advertisements.
Instead, according to the documents, quote, The government also relied on earned media featuring, quote-unquote, influencers from communities hit hard by COVID-19 and, quote-unquote, experts like White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr.
Anthony Fauci and other academics to be interviewed and promote vaccination in the news.
And then furthermore, in terms of the influencer and expert marketing that was mentioned in the statement, well, here's how it actually played out.
Quote, Meaning that as these newsrooms were producing story after story regarding the COVID vaccines,
unbeknownst to the rest of us, taxpayer dollars were flowing directly into their bank accounts, and this was almost universally not disclosed to the actual audience within the news reports.
Now, it's worth mentioning that even though these documents gave out more details regarding how these publications received the federal money and how the ads actually functioned behind the scenes, to be frank, this is not a surprise development.
Because it was already public knowledge that last year, in fiscal year of 2021, Congress appropriated $1 billion for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to spend on, quote, activities to strengthen vaccine confidence in the United States.
And so I want to be crystal clear.
I'm not saying that these media outlets were lying about anything.
Perhaps this federal funding was exactly aligned with what they were going to report anyway.
For instance, these media outlets might have been critical of Florida's new guidance on vaccinating children, regardless of whether they receive millions in federal funding to advertise the vaccine.
However, I believe that as Americans, as you and me, who enjoy the right to freedom of the press and freedom of speech, well, we at the very least deserve to know about any even potential conflicts of interest within media.
If you'd like to read more about either this taxpayer funding or about this new guidance over in Florida, I'll throw all those links into the description box below this video for you to check out.
And all I ask in return is that you take a super quick moment to smash, smash, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
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Now, Roman in the studio, back to you.
And now, let's shift gears just a little bit.
While I was down in Florida, I took the unique opportunity to sit down and speak with Congressman Billy Long.
And together, we discussed the looming danger of the massive national debt that's hanging above our heads, as well as whether or not there is any political will within the Republican Party To address this looming threat if they take back Congress.
Take a listen.
So we are here in Florida at this year's CPAC, and we have a unique opportunity.
We're sitting down with Billy Long, a congressman from the great state of Missouri, or as he pronounces it, Missouri?
Missouri.
That's right.
Good to have you.
Thank you, Roman.
Can you please introduce yourself, what you did maybe before coming into Congress and what you're doing now?
Okay, sure, sure.
I was an auctioneer and a real estate broker for 31 years before I ever ran for Congress, so I didn't have any political background, but I always thought that we needed people like me that had signed the front of a check, that weren't career politicians, that had hired people, fired people, and so that's why I ran for Congress.
I was 55 years old when I got sworn in, so I don't owe anybody anything.
Nobody owes me anything.
And I took a six-term pledge when I went.
And the difference in me and these other candidates is I'm sticking to my pledge.
If you go and ask around how many people made a pledge that only served so many years in Congress and so many years in the Senate, they all break their pledge.
I could have stayed in the House for as long as I wanted.
After my first race, which was a very competitive eight-way race, I had primaries, but I never had a competitive election.
So I was able to raise money to help other candidates in purple seats to make them red or keep them red.
And so that was always my intent, was to help build up the numbers in the House.
So what you mentioned there is something I really want to highlight.
So you came in, you had signed the front of a check, you had ran businesses, you had employees.
However, right now in Congress, the thinking seems to be not business-like at all, in my opinion.
About a month ago, we crossed the $30 trillion national debt mark.
However, if you actually add in the unfunded liabilities, the Medicare, the Medicaid, the Social Security, the pensions that are going out to the military officers and the government officials, I read an estimate that it's closer to $160 trillion.
That's the national debt.
What's your opinion about that, of course, as both a member of Congress and as a business owner, a former business owner?
What's your opinion?
That seems unsustainable to me.
What do you think?
I was very close with President Trump, and I don't have the best Trump voting record of anybody running this race.
Because of some of those big packages they want to put through, I'd always say no.
I'd vote no on them.
And if you can't say no, how are you going to get the debt under control ever?
And it's easy just to go along, to get along.
I don't believe in continuing resolutions.
I may have voted for one or two for extenuating circumstances over the years, but I don't believe in continuing resolutions.
I think we need to budget, which is something we don't do in Congress anymore, and we need to be extremely mindful of the taxpayers' pocketbooks, and we're not.
We don't care at all the way that it's been run lately, so I think that...
Marsha Blackburn, when she was in the House, she was one of my colleagues in the House, now a very great senator from the state of Tennessee.
She'd always put forth a 1% reduction across the board.
I'd always vote for it.
It wouldn't go anywhere.
But that's the type of things that we have to look at, you know, look outside of the box and figure out who's going to...
Somebody said, well, our kids and grandkids are going to be paying this down.
And one guy said, we're paying for it right now.
So it's ridiculous to just think you can keep writing checks that won't clear and expect them to clear.
Yeah.
Do you see any hope along this front?
Because a lot of people are saying, well, and the polls are showing that the Republicans might really take back not only the House, but also the Senate in its upcoming midterm.
Do you see any any hope?
Do you see any political willpower?
Because let's say they do take back the House.
Well, these kinds of measures oftentimes aren't pretty and they're not very popular to say, well, we need to cut back.
We need to take things away.
Do you see any possibility that this issue can be addressed?
I certainly think that it can.
And.
And another thing that can be done is we can stop what Joe Biden's doing.
We can slow it down.
Right now, the only thing we can do is what Pelosi wants us to vote on in the House.
You can't even bring Bill to the floor unless she says you can.
So right now, we just need to keep...
Working as hard as we can.
We're going to take the House back in big numbers.
We need to take that Senate seat back, or the Senate back, and the red seat in Missouri needs to stay red.
And if we get the wrong person to elect, we've got a former governor that had to resign after 18 months, and if we put him as our nominee, The party says, well, I spent $40 to $50 million trying to drag him across the finish line.
For with me, the Democrats won't even come after me.
They won't come after any of the other candidates in this race because they know they can't win that seat.
But if we put the wrong person in there, and I told President Trump this, I announced on August the 3rd, And New York there.
And then I went over and went up Trump Tower and sat down and talked to the president for 45 minutes, just the two of us, him on one side of his desk, me on the other side.
And I told him that very thing, I said, you need to endorse me.
If you endorse me, I win, going away.
And if you do that, then we're going to say $40 to $50 million that we can spend in Arizona.
Picking up that seat, we should have never, ever lost.
And spend it in Georgia on that seat, we should have never, ever lost.
Normally, you elect a senator.
They're in for six years, and so you don't think about it again.
Nobody remembers that those were special elections in Georgia and Arizona.
They're both back on the ballot, plus Missouri.
So you've got three races that are very important to firing Chuck Schumer.
And we need to fire Chuck Schumer.
We're going to fire Nancy Pelosi.
That's a given.
There's 30 of my colleagues that have resigned, or not resigned, but are not going to run again on the Democrat side.
They know that a tsunami is coming.
It's going to take them all out.
So they're like, why don't I not campaign?
Why don't I don't raise money?
Why don't I just go home at the end of my term?
And that's what they've elected to do because they know it's coming.
The Democrats are so unpopular.
Joe Biden is so unpopular.
But we've still got three years to put up with him and Kamala.
So we've got to get in there and stop You've got to stop what they're doing, number one.
That saves you a lot of money.
And number two, then cut back on the spending.
So those are the two things we have to do.
So shifting gears a little bit to what's happening right now in Ukraine between Ukraine and Russia.
So, of course, just last early morning, Russia began an aggressive campaign against Ukraine in multiple cities across the country.
So let's set aside what led up to it for a moment.
So let's take that as fact.
Moving forward, what do you think the best approach for America would be in addressing what's happening?
And with the sanctions that have been announced thus far, do you think that's a proper approach?
Do you think there should be more or less?
What do you think?
I think that they should put every sanction on they can possibly think of.
But it's not just putting on sanctions, Roman.
We're not implementing those sanctions and sticking to them.
North Korea is the most sanctioned country in the world, but nobody implements the sanctions.
Nobody cares about it.
After you say, I want to sanction them, so we need follow-up on this, and we need to do it in their energy sector where it really, really hits them.
But when we're a net importer of energy instead of a net exporter like we were on January 19, 2021, then that becomes a problem.
We're buying oil off of Russia, so what are we going to tell Putin?
We need that oil, so how straightforward are we going to be with him on Ukraine?
He built the tanks up for months.
He built the troops up for months and kept saying, the president of Ukraine said, oh, the Americans need to quit talking about war.
We're not going to be at war.
Really.
Everyone saw this coming, the intelligence that we had on that.
Everybody knew that it was coming.
It was like Putin was wearing a GoPro.
We had such good intelligence, everything was spelled out on how they were going to do this, and so it's ridiculous that we have to kowtow to Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB guy.
But somebody sent me a meme yesterday that had Putin on the famous horse picture with no shirt on, and Joe Biden walking out of an ice cream store with two big ice cream cones.
And another thing people don't realize, when you're president for life, when Putin's president for life, and our president's term limited to eight years, when she, President Xi, is president for life, How many times did they invade during Trump's presidency?
None.
How many times did they push around Taiwan during Trump's presidency?
None.
Depending on if you're talking about Russia or talking about China.
I was in Kiev back in 2014 and we were in a restaurant and we were looking We were going out as far east as we could go with their military to see, because Putin was bringing body bags home.
He said they weren't in Ukraine, but they were bringing body bags home, and so he had to finally admit, he kept telling the parents that these were training accidents, all these dead bodies coming home, these Russian soldiers, so he had to admit what was going on.
But in that restaurant under the wine list, there was a wine listed from the temporarily occupied region of Crimea.
This is 2014.
I thought, I don't believe that's temporarily occupied.
And now you see what he's doing with further aggression, killing people indiscriminately for no good reason other than he wants to rebuild the old Russia and redraw the lines over there.
And everyone just standing around watching it happen.
And but where we if we're going to send troops anywhere, the first place we need to send them is our southern border.
I went down there with President Trump back in April of 2021 after he was out of office.
We were down there like April 30th, I believe.
And you don't even have to go to the border like Trump and I did to see the problem.
All you got to do is sit in the McAllen Airport and watch them loading hundreds and hundreds of illegals on a commercial airliner sitting right next to me and you.
They've got a big manila envelope or folder around their neck with a white string tied around to hang from their neck.
And they've got their instructions when they land, what to do or what to say or what to try and translate to people.
And they get free cell phones, free hotel.
They don't even tell these city fathers that they're coming.
So we need to implement border security here.
We're worried about Ukraine's border.
Let's worry about our border, too.
That's a great point.
Now, that was not the full interview.
If you'd like to watch that interview in its entirety, as well as a plethora of other phenomenal content, you can do so over on Epic TV, which is our awesome no-censorship video platform.
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I hope you subscribe and even spread it to your friends and family so that the facts can be spread ever more widely across this great country.
And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman, from The Epoch Times.
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