It’s tempting to try to forget the COVID-19 pandemic. Nobody likes to dwell on bad memories. But we do ourselves no favors if we forget how the federal, state, and local governments responded to the crisis — especially the public health bureaucracies.
From the possible source of the virus in China to the effectiveness of masks to social distancing to school closures to vaccine mandates, officials squandered the public’s trust and goodwill with dishonesty, arrogance, and authoritarianism.
And we’re still learning the extent of the rot. Documents recently obtained by my group, Protect the Public’s Trust, further illustrate just how far the Biden administration went in combating what they called “misinformation” around COVID-19 — all the while spreading their own often faulty and inconsistent messaging about the pandemic and vaccination.
BIDEN JUDGE BLOCKS RFK JR. EFFORT TO MODIFY CHILDHOOD VACCINE POLICY
The documents, which contain talking points and agenda items for former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and his various interviews with major outlets, reveal how the Biden administration forced corporations and Americans to swallow certain narratives — and reject others — about the pandemic. They included points ensuring that medical experts provided certain information about COVID-19 and vaccination to the public, sorting through which Americans were “persuadable” by the government’s COVID information, making sure journalists were flagging what the government deemed “misinformation,” and pushing the surgeon general himself to emotionally manipulate Americans into complying.
Murthy’s talking points for a July 2021 address asked journalists to avoid amplifying “misinformation” and tech companies to “operate with greater transparency and accountability so that misinformation doesn’t continue to poison our sharing platforms.” (That they unironically call for greater transparency and accountability in the cause of censorship is head-scratching.) They also stressed, “If we want to fight health misinformation, we’ll need all parts of society to pull together.” Such requests merely hinted at how far Biden officials went in seeking to control the flow of “misinformation” on social media sites, since we know they directly petitioned companies to censor COVID-19 information they didn’t approve.
Talking points provided to Murthy ahead of an interview that same month with the Pod Save America podcast encouraged him to talk about the Biden administration’s analysis of which Americans were “persuadable” when pushed to vaccinate and which were less so. They suggested that outreach should go “community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, person by person” to convince unvaccinated citizens to get the shots.
Murthy’s handlers alluded to these petitions later in the documents. Talking points for the surgeon general’s interview with the Washington Post that July revealed that Murthy’s office was also “flagging problematic posts for social platforms.” The document stated, “Facebook is aware of our concerns and we have requested changes,” adding that platforms spreading so-called disinformation are doing a “disservice to the country” and to U.S. medical professionals.
For Murthy’s interview with NBC Nightly News on July 19, 2021, the talking points also pushed the surgeon general to assert that COVID misinformation on social media is “costing us lives,” specifically, the lives of 10 of his own family members. “Misinformation” played a major role in Murthy’s briefing materials, and he urged social media platforms “to step up and stop the spread of bad health information on their platforms.”
PPT filed multiple complaints against the Biden administration, including the surgeon general’s office, for spreading inconsistent and inaccurate information about the pandemic. In a 2024 complaint, PPT noted that Murthy’s claim that students maintaining “3-6 feet of social distancing” would be safe was not backed up by a sufficient study.
A 2023 PPT complaint covered inaccurate claims made by the Department of Health and Human Services and its sub-agencies about the pandemic response. In one instance, the CDC miscited research to falsely support claims that COVID-19 vaccines were superior to natural immunity from prior infection, and it pushed that narrative even when presented with contrary evidence, which it admitted was “impressive.”
THE FTC’S WAR ON LOW PRICES ISN’T OVER YET
It’s darkly ironic that Murthy and others obsessed over fighting misinformation when much of the actual misinformation was coming from inside their house. All the spin, talking points, and manipulation couldn’t hide that fact.
Whether it was prolonged school closures from which a generation of children may never recover, draconian lockdowns, or forcing vaccines upon people for whom the virus presented little risk, power, politics, and advancing the narrative took priority over science and public health. The public’s trust in its health officials may never recover.
Michael Chamberlain is the director of Protect the Public’s Trust.