Biden Admin Spent Nearly $1B On Inaccurate COVID Messaging; Report Details How To Stop It From Happening Again

The party of "science" misled hundreds of millions of people on the actual science surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Stop the presses.

Starting in early-2020, the combined efforts of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services and their partners in the media caused an untold amount of damage to society, public health and might have even created conditions for increased COVID spread. How? They repeatedly, profoundly, and often purposefully communicated inaccurate information, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get their preferred messages across.

Now, a new, massive, 113-page report from the U.S. House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Committee has detailed the remarkable abuses from the Biden-Harris administration and how they communicated during COVID. 

WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 29: Anthony Fauci (R), Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to the President, speaks alongside U.S. President Joe Biden as he delivers remarks on the Omicron COVID-19 variant. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Biden, CDC Partners Wasted A Fortune To Lie To The American People

The report details a number of unbelievable inaccuracies in 2021 coming from the Biden administration's communications team and the CDC's messaging apparatus. Fauci and Francis Collins' National Institutes of Health were also responsible, creating guidance using taxpayer money, nearly $1 billion, per the report, that misled millions of people and caused unimaginable harm in the process.

"While the Biden-Harris administration’s public health guidance led to prolonged closures of schools and businesses, the NIH was spending nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money trying to manipulate Americans with advertisements—sometimes containing erroneous or unproven information. By overpromising what the COVID-19 vaccines could do—in direct contradiction of the FDA’s authorizations—and over emphasizing the virus’s risk to children and young adults, the Biden-Harris administration caused Americans to lose trust in the public health system," Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said after the report's release. "Our investigation also uncovered the extent to which public funding went to Big Tech companies to track and monitor Americans, underscoring the need for stronger online data privacy protections."

One of the most damaging, and woefully incorrect messaging campaigns centered on vaccine efficacy against infection. As the report details, Biden's "Stop the Spread" campaign was a pervasive marketing effort, in conjunction with the CDC, that claimed vaccines would end the pandemic by reducing infections. That had enormous knock-on effects, including decreasing trust in all vaccinations and ultimately harming public health.

 "The entire premise of the Biden-Harris ‘Stop the Spread’ campaign was that if you got vaccinated for COVID-19, you could resume daily activities because they said vaccinated people would not spread the disease," said Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chair Morgan Griffith (R-VA). "Despite lacking scientific basis, the administration bought into this CDC claim and misled the American public. As a result, vaccination coverage with other vaccines appears to have declined, I believe because of a growing distrust of information coming from our public health institutions." 

This campaign was even more disingenuous and purposefully misleading than previously realized. The "Stop the Spread" publicity blitz hid in plain sight a message from the CDC that even they didn't know whether the vaccines actually did stop infection or transmission. The report shared a screenshot of a page from the Biden administration's marketing that specifically said "science" wasn't sure how well the vaccines worked against infection. 

Yet the Biden administration made life-altering policy decisions like vaccine mandates, discriminatory entry processes, and military vaccination requirements regardless. On top of the less quantifiable impacts like nudging millions of people to follow their preferred course of action.

CDC Guidance Exacerbated Existing Problems

The report also explains how the Biden administration relied heavily on guidance from the CDC, an organization that thoroughly disgraced itself during the pandemic. There were several examples highlighted, chief among them that CDC "experts" went far beyond what even the FDA claimed COVID vaccines could do.

Without evidence, the report says Biden's marketing claimed that "COVID vaccines were highly effective against transmission." Within just a few months, it was clear that all the available evidence pointed in the exact opposite direction. Per the report, this had a "negative impact on vaccine confidence and the CDC’s credibility when proven untrue." 

The CDC also had "inconsistent and flawed messaging about the effectiveness of masks," which created seemingly endless mandates and again, overconfidence in an ineffective policy. Some of those mandates even continue to this day.

READ: Mask Mandates Are Back In California, As Endless Cycle Continues

That's just the start of their misinformation. A wealth of data and public embarrassments for the CDC confirmed that the organization "consistently overstated the risk of COVID-19 to children," the report says. That fearmongering had disastrous consequences, from unnecessarily terrifying parents to prolonged school closures and lack of socialization. Setting an entire generation of children back in the process.

Still, after being repeatedly and profoundly proven wrong, the CDC has demonstrated they've yet to learn their lesson. In late-2024, the CDC continues to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for babies starting at six months old. That makes the US a global outlier compared to European nations who have maintained at least some level of intellectual honesty.

How Do We Fix CDC Abuses?

The report detailed several recommendations to fix these organizations after their disastrous work during the pandemic. Even implementing just a select few, listed below, would do wonders for fixing the institutional rot that influenced these mistakes. 

• Congress should consider clarifying responsibility for evaluating the safety of vaccines and streamline existing reporting systems for capturing vaccine injuries and adverse reactions.
• HHS and its agencies should embrace a culture of transparency and accountability.
• The CDC and federal public health officials should not attempt to silence dissenting scientific opinions.

Also highlighted in the report is how the CDC and NIH put their weight behind attempts to censor scientists who dissented from their preferred narratives. Beyond their mistakes, profound inaccuracies and nearly unlimited spending, their censorship efforts are equally concerning.

As we learned during COVID, if there's one thing "experts" hate, it's being told that they were proven wrong. Instead of learning, adjusting and apologizing, they move to censor, criticize and mislead. This new report is the latest confirmation of these unacceptable "mistakes." And reaffirms the importance of ensuring they never happen again.