The “We Can Do This”: Covid Public Health ‘Education’ Campaign
Recently I read the 113-page, “We Can Do This”: An Assessment of the Department of Health and Human Services’ COVID-19 Public Health Campaign.” While everyone is probably sick of hearing about the pandemic, there is much to be gained by thoroughly understanding what we went through as a nation and how national public health policies affected us here in Nevada County. I forwarded the report to our public health officials, Board of Supervisors, and County CEO, Alison Lehman. Hopefully they will read it.
Federal Government Shaping Public Opinion
“In August 2020, as Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was in the final stages of vaccine trials, the HHS’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs (ASPA) initiated a COVID-19 public education campaign called the “We Can Do This” Campaign to shape the public’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccine uptake, masking, social distancing and booster vaccine uptake.”
The report is a chronological accounting of the ads, blog posts, and public relations materials produced for the “We Can Do This” Campaign which brings into focus the Biden administration’s failed response to the pandemic. The goal of the report is to understand why there was such a resulting collapse of the public’s trust in public health messaging.
With a $900 million budget, the goal of the Campaign was to increase public confidence in the COVID-19 vaccines, including boosters. It did this through finely honed advertising that would prompt changes in the behavior of the American public to more readily accept anything and everything that came along with the government’s push to get vaccinated.
Government goal was to convince public to accept state and federal mandates
The goal was to have everyone adopt mandated public health policies, including masking, school closures, vaccine mandates, home isolation, and business closures. None of these policies stopped the variants from spreading.
The Campaign also sought to address ‘misinformation’ that feeds the mistrust of scientific and public health communities and local public health entities. Unfortunately, as is well documented in current lawsuits, the Biden White House censored credible scientific information they didn’t like as misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, thus preventing the American public from being able to make critical health decisions based on emerging real time data.
The first data clue in the spring of 2021 was the quickly waning effectiveness of the vaccines.
The second data clue showed the vaccinated were also spreading the virus. The continuing subvariant spread could no longer be blamed on the unvaccinated.
Nonetheless, advertising material was created to convince the American people that COVID-19 posed a sufficient threat and they should follow the government’s recommendations and mandates. Health and Human Services and the CDC needed only to ‘appear to be credible’ in its communications to the public.
The Biden administration continued to use the Campaign as the vehicle for disseminating its Covid policies which actually resulted in failure and increasing distrust of federal and state public health policies.
Nevada County Public Health ignored the actual science in favor of government campaign information
In Nevada County we experienced these failed policies in the messaging of our local Health Department, and newly hired Public Health Officer, Dr. Sherilyn Cooke, who unquestionably supported CDC’s faulty science and wouldn’t budge when updated science was presented to them. Instead, there was strict adherence to “science” that turned out to be deeply flawed. The CDC’s failures to update recommendations and guidance, given new information was repeated locally, the messaging being only, “get vaccinated, keep boosting.”
“CDC’s guidance, which the Campaign relied on, went beyond the terms of the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to state, without evidence, that COVID vaccines were highly effective against transmission. This ultimately had a negative impact on vaccine confidence and the CDC’s credibility when proven untrue.
The CDC had inconsistent and flawed messaging about the effectiveness of masks.
The CDC consistently overstated the risk of COVID-19 to children.
The CDC continues to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for all Americans ages six months and older, which has made the United States a global outlier in COVID-19 policy.”
Our Nevada County website, Health and Human Services, still uses the CDC recommendation of Covid vaccines for children, at least one dose, for children in the 7-18 group even though children are at low risk for severe Covid illness.
“As early as the Spring of 2020, researchers were beginning to find that children were at lower risk of severe COVID-19 infection than adults. A Swiss study, first published in December of 2020, found the risk of severe disease and death associated with COVID-19 was “relatively rare” in children and young adults.”
