A Natalie Winters report. (The bolding is original to the article.)
REVEALED: The Government Paid Hundreds Of Influencers To Promote COVID Vaccines. I Unmasked Dozens Of Them.

The recovered ads promoted COVID shots for children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers while a 247.7-million-message monitoring system shaped the campaign’s talking points.

The federal government funded an $80 million project that paid 496 social-media influencers to promote COVID vaccines.

The project’s own report disclosed the existence of these influencers, but it never named them. 

I traced Instagram paid-partnership labels, #ad captions, reposts and archived advertising records to identify 57 accounts connected to apparently sponsored campaign content.

The recovered posts reveal what the government-funded vaccine push looked like inside people’s feeds:

• A technology creator told followers: “Do your part, step up, get vaccinated and vaccinate your children!!”

• A native paid partnership promoted vaccination during pregnancy and claimed babies born to vaccinated mothers faced a lower risk of COVID hospitalization.

• Another paid partnership highlighted a vaccinated six-year-old and said the family acted partly to protect a two-year-old.

• An official campaign repost carrying #ad invoked pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding while calling vaccination the “BEST decision” for a mother and her daughter.

• A campaign-linked contest offered a $100 Amazon gift card for public vaccination stories and recruitment into El Beacon’s volunteer network.

• Another official repost carrying #ad described the vaccines as “completely safe”.

The thesis is not complicated: federal health money supported a project that paid private social-media personalities to convince people to take COVID vaccines.

But behind those posts was an operation built to monitor the vaccine debate and update its messaging in response. 

THE SYSTEM BEHIND THE PAID POSTS

From September 2021 through April 2022, Public Good Projects and Hispanic Communications Network ran English- and Spanish-language searches containing hundreds of vaccine-related keywords, hashtags and phrases.

The system captured 212.7 million English-language messages and 35 million Spanish-language messages from social-media platforms, news sites, video sites and other public sources—247.7 million in total.

Staff reviewed leading results every week for claims they classified as trending or emerging misinformation. The report says the findings “directly informed”prompts telling influencers “what to include in their posts’ captions.” Those prompts were updated throughout the year.

Public Good Projects also monitored comments for misinformation and supplied influencers with counter-messaging or resources. The same monitoring findings produced weekly rebuttal guidance for Hispanic-serving community organizations.

The 496 influencers produced 1,000 posts—524 Instagram feed posts, 468 Instagram Stories and eight posts across Facebook, TikTok and Twitter. The campaign reported a potential reach of 37.2 million people.

The influencer network was only one part of the operation. The project also recruited 1,034 digital volunteers and two celebrities, produced 206 “misinformation insights” and 206 rebuttal talking points, and distributed messaging through newsletters, social-media materials, community trainings, Spanish-language radio announcements and op-eds.

WHO PAID FOR IT

The report states that the project was “100 percent funded by CDC/HHS.”

Federal records place the work under a broader $25.66 million fiscal-year 2021 award from the CDC’s immunization center to the CDC Foundation. That amount funded the wider Partnering for Vaccine Equity program—not El Beacon alone—and the records do not reveal how much was spent on the influencers.

The CDC Foundation worked with Public Good Projects, Hispanic Communications Network and World Voices Media. Public Good Projects created El Beacon and recruited the paid influencer network.

The recovered ads generally disclosed a relationship with El Beacon through #ad, paid-partnership labels or campaign branding. El Beacon separately recruited unpaid volunteers and reposted some vaccine testimonials without advertising labels, while the 57 accounts identified here were tied to posts carrying #ad, a “paid partnership” label or equivalent advertising metadata—strong evidence that the promotions involved money or another benefit.

But none of the sponsorship disclosures in the recovered 57-account sample identified CDC, HHS or the CDC Foundation as the ultimate source of the funding. Followers were shown El Beacon. They were not shown the federal government and monitoring system behind it.

THE RECEIPTS

Not an abstract strategy. These are the recovered posts. The examples below show what the federally funded campaign published or amplified. The unedited screenshots accompanying this article appear in the same order.

At this point in the article you can see some of the actual posts by those people, and the names of others with links to their posts. It’s too much to include here.

…This is not the complete roster. The campaign reports 1,000 influencer posts—including 524 Instagram feed posts and 468 Instagram stories—so hundreds of posts and most of the names remain unrecovered. The full list was managed through the GRIN influencer platform and has not been released publicly.

This was a “See, everybody’s doing it” campaign. Be careful whom you trust.

I’m guessing that’s supposed to be a racial slur? I don’t think anyone relates to “the Confederacy” in the same way that they react when Hitler is mentioned. It won’t resonate.

This one isn’t even fun, like “bitter clingers” and “basket of deplorables.” It’s just dumb.

They have nothing.

Mike Davis:

If you conspire to use the postal service to commit election fraud, you face federal conspiracy and mail fraud charges. US attorneys need to start making examples.

Democrats are not hiding it anymore.

They are the party of Islamists. The party of Marxists. The party of communists.

They are getting brazen about relying on noncitizens to illegally vote in our elections.

Don’t be complacent.

Demand Congress pass the SAVE America Act now.

Thanks for having me, @dbongino.