Meet the “Misinformation Busters”: How They Speak, Who Funds Them & What They Think of You

A monthly public Zoom webinar held by an initiative called “Building Trust” is a window into the minds and psyche of the people who are fully entrenched in the Medical/Pharma establishment, and the shocking things they’ll say in order to push a well-funded agenda.

Part I

Back in January, the DailyClout reported on an organization called the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation. The ABIM Foundation created an initiative called Building Trust which aims to build trust in healthcare. The official mission statement of Building Trust, as stated on its website is as follows:

“Building Trust is an ABIM Foundation initiative that aims to elevate the importance of trust as an essential organizing principle to guide operations and improvements in health care. We will identify and promote best practices in building trust by collaborating with organizations across various health care sectors.”

While the above statement may sound innocuous and even noble, a quick look at the Building Trust website reveals that the ABIM Foundation holds regular Building Trust Zoom webinars to discuss how to approach vaccine hesitancy, and counter “medical misinformation” online. Past webinars include topics such as “Countering Medical Misinformation through Social Media”, “Countering Medical Misinformation”, “Building Trust through Community Partnerships” and more.

In last month’s webinar, the self-proclaimed “misinformation busters” made statements about vaccine injuries that were shockingly flippant. That article with video clips included can be found here.

Part II

Part II of this series takes a look behind the curtain at how pharma-funded online activists via non-profit organizations are strategizing to combat the sheer flood of, in their terms, “misinformation” (i.e., real-world observations and documented evidence) that is threatening to bring down the entire house of cards surrounding the COVID mRNA vaccine narrative.

• There are numerous non-profit organizations that continue to receive funding from major pharma-adjacent entities such as The Rockefeller Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
• These small non-profits funded by the entities named above apparently exist solely to control the public narrative surrounding COVID mRNA vaccines.
• The organizations actively attempt to censor people online who speak negatively about the mRNA vaccines.
• The CDC cooperates directly with a number of these organizations.
• Members of these organizations openly strategize on video. Part of their strategy is to completely divert conversations away from vaccine injuries and medical freedom. 

Medical Freedom warriors are fighting an information war because they’ve had propaganda shoved down their throats and into their bodies, and they’ve had enough. The Establishment’s medical system is fighting an information war because it NEEDS everyone to believe its lies. It’s desperate for everyone to believe its lies.

Luckily, the establishment is really bad at it, as can be seen in maximum-cringe social media posts with zero engagement:

Unluckily, the pharmaceutical companies and public health agencies had a major head start. And billions of dollars, of course.

“Misinformation Is Here to Stay”

“Misinformation is here to stay” was the overall message of a public Zoom meeting held by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation. The ABIM Foundation is a subsidiary of the American Board of Internal Medicine and has a branch called “Building Trust” whose sole purpose appears to be fighting “misinformation”. The organization holds a public monthly webinar, and while the people who run it appear to want to attract viewers, they generally get less than 100 attendees and a similar amount of views on the YouTube video they post afterward on their site.

The February session of Building Trust’s webinar was run by Daniel Wolfson, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of The ABIM Foundation, along with two guest panelists:

• Dr. David Scales,MD is an Assistant Professor at Weills College and the Chief Medical Officer for an organization called Critica Science.
• Dr. Hussain Lalani, MD, MPH, is a Primary Care Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Co-Founder of This is Our Shot.

The organizations in which both guests are heavily involved are funded by entities whose purpose is to combat vaccine hesitancy, “misinformation” and “disinformation”.

The Big Business of “Combating Misinformation”

“Misinformation” is a word that has been in existence since the 1580s, yet has had very little practical usage until extremely recently. A quick look at Google trends shows the rise in usage of the word.

In 2018, Dictionary.com designated the word “misinformation” as its Word of the Year. Dictionary.com defines misinformation as “false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead”.

The Washington Post published an article written by education and foreign affairs reporter Valerie Strauss about misinformation in 2018 after the word won Word of the Year. Ms. Strauss laments the spread of “misinformation” across social media platforms, praises tech companies that were censoring “misinformation spreaders”, and calls for even more top-down control over public conversations online.

Who Decides?

The question of the year, decade, and century is Who Decides? Who decides what qualifies as “misinformation”?

In the current environment, there are mass amounts of people who occupy the same physical space, yet live in completely alternate emotional realities that are based on opposing foundational facts. Each group has a set of experts it trusts to give over accurate information, and each group is 100% convinced that the other side is crazy, and cannot understand how the other side doesn’t see what it sees.

The two sides are not equal. Those who occupy a reality in which the mRNA boosters are saviors have been actively targeted by a relentless propaganda campaign backed by some of the world’s richest and most powerful entities.

Those who occupy a reality in which all government COVID measures including mRNA vaccines have left pain, disaster, and death in its wake live in that reality either because they were already skeptical of big government and giant corporations or because unfortunately, the painful reality of the COVID response hit them in the face on a personal level.

The orchestrators of the pro-vaccine, pro-mask, pro-mandate propaganda campaign appear to understand that the upper hand they enjoyed during the early days of COVID in the public sphere no longer exists. As an entity, the Medical/Pharma Establishment is desperately attempting to keep the public’s attention on COVID risks and boosters, while diverting attention away from the very real flood of vaccine injuries, all while vaccine uptake plummets to the floor.

The methods the Establishment is using for diversion include projection, gaslighting, censorship, manipulating language, and lying. The organizations mentioned in the Zoom Webinar are funded arms of the Medical/Pharma Establishment and engage in the following behaviors, as can be seen by watching members of the organizations strategize on video:

Projection: Projection is when someone accuses his opponent of doing something for which he himself is actually guilty.  The Medical/Pharma Establishment created hype and negativity around the word “misinformation”. It then repeatedly accused an entire sector of the professional public that opposed the official COVID response of spreading false information, while refusing to engage or debate directly to defend its own false claims on vaccine safety and more.

Gaslighting: The Medical Establishment directly and openly gaslights vaccine-injured victims by downplaying or ignoring their stories, claiming they don’t exist, or claiming that the injuries are emotional and exist only in their heads.

Censorship: The Medical Establishment openly cooperated with the White House and the CDC to actively remove professionals who disagreed with official COVID policy from the online sphere.

Manipulating Language: The Medical Establishment uses specific buzzwords as weapons to deflect from having to engage in conversation. “Misinformation”, “Anti-vax”, “Conspiracy Theorist” and more are all tossed directly at those who disagree with the official narrative, and the Establishment itself has painted people with that label as unworthy of engagement.

Lying: The Medical Establishment is still trying to claim that one who gets a vaccine will save his grandmother, as well as that the mRNA vaccines are safe and effective.

What follows is a look at numerous organizations that were mentioned in the February session of the “Building Trust” Webinar:

Critica Science

Critica Science, an organization with which Dr. Scales is involved, has a stated mission. Its mission is to research how people get scientific information, and to combat “mis and disinformation”, particularly surrounding the topics of the safety of drinking water from the municipal water supply in the US, and the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines. In a stunning display of strategic genius, the game plan of Critica’s team, as written on Critica’s site, is to “Search the Internet for comments people posted about drinking water and vaccines on public websites and social media platforms. Then we make comments and enter the conversation”.

Such initiatives are drawing grants worth millions of dollars.

In the “About” section of Critica’s website, it claims there are no conflicts of interest, and the organization does not take any money from entities that would present a conflict of interest to its mission of combating misinformation. It states that Critica’s funding comes from “private donors with no such connections and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation”.

Actually, it only states that in a hidden copy of the About Critica page. On the public About page on Critica’s site, no such disclaimer is made and no donors are mentioned.

The Origins of Critica

An article was published in The Atlantic in 2016 titled “Why Do People Fall For Charismatic Leaders”, by Olga Khazan. In the article, Jack Gorman, MD and CEO of Critica, is quoted discussing his new venture called “Critica” which will explore methods of convincing the American public on specific topics in a manner that would shift behaviors.

Can the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation truly be considered a neutral donor with no conflict of interest?

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the only named donor in the hidden copy of the “About Critica” page as shown above. The RWJ Foundation’s website discusses combatting vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, as well as issues surrounding “health equity”.

The RWJ Foundation funds multiple other projects similar to Critica, such as The Mercury Project, launched by the Social Science Research Council, which also receives major funding from The Rockefeller Foundation.

From the Rockefeller Foundation website:

The Social Science Research Council, with funding from The Rockefeller Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, will quantify the costs and harms of mis- and disinformation, and identify new tools to reduce its impact.

The Mercury Project seems to be one of the places that tie this all together, with the entities that fund the Mercury Project also funding other similar ventures. The Mercury Project’s 2023 Proposal document on its website discusses:

Goals:

• Increase vaccination demand
• Establish “healthier information environments”

$25 Million Partially Funded By: 

• The Rockefeller Foundation
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (which also funds Critica Science, where Dr. David Scales works)
• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Inspired By:

• The World Health Organization
• The US Surgeon General

It ends up looking a little something like this:

Zoom Webinar Clip 1: Project Vectr

Project Vectr was mentioned in the Building Trust Webinar by Daniel Wolfson of the ABIM Foundation as being a CDC-involved organization that, too, attempts to combat “misinformation”. Project Vectr boasts on its website that it “provides the power to understand and combat the transmission of vaccine misinformation, to improve the public’s health”.

In the ABIM Foundation Zoom Webinar, guest panelist Dr. Hussain Lalani described a dashboard created by Project Vectr for the express purpose of limiting misinformation.

“These organizations used a couple of different tools in order to collate and organize all of this circulating misinformation on social media. And they produced reports and dashboard on a weekly and sometimes more frequent basis that helped us to identify the major themes that were circulating”

The website is obscure, and access to the “misinformation data trackers” dashboard is only granted to users after an approval process. However, in a public short promo video on its site, the background appears to be an image of the dashboard itself, and names such as The Children’s Health Defense and Del Bigtree can be seen as flagged. Oddly, the date in the corner is marked as October 2019.

As can be clearly seen in this video clip, the dashboard collected specific posts, topics, and personalities to highlight as “misinformation spreaders” which Project Vectr then presumably shares with its fellow Misinformation-Busters.

Who is Project Vectr? 

As appears on the bottom of the Project Vectr website, it is a partner of UNICEF. It is a collaboration between The Public Good Projects and The New York State Health Foundation.

The Public Good Projects is yet another non-profit organization dedicated to public health equity and messaging, supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, Google, UNICEF, and the Yale Institute of Global Health.

#ThisIsOurShot 

Dr. Hussein Lalani co-founded “#ThisisOurShot for a COVID-Free World”. #ThisIsOurShot is another organization whose goal is to combat vaccine misinformation and “build trust”. It’s supported by a long list of US-based medical institutions:

Who You Gonna Call?… The Misinformation Busters! 

Mr. Lalani is also involved with an organization called “Shots Heard Round the World“. The organization defines itself as “a rapid-response digital cavalry dedicated to protecting the online safety of healthcare providers and practices.”

Unsurprisingly, Shots Heard Round the World is also funded by The Public Good Projects.

Updated to include the origins for Project Vectr and Shots Heard Round the World, the “Misinformation-Busters flow chart” looks something like this:

The New York State Health Foundation awarded a $75,000 grant to The Public Good Projects for the purpose of supporting Project Vectr to combat vaccine misinformation. It must be noted that this was awarded in November 2020, before a single COVID mRNA shot was administered.

Zoom Webinar Clip 2:  Project Vectr, The Virality Project, + CDC 

Although there is no mention of a connection between Project Vectr and the CDC anywhere on either website, Mr. Daniel Wolfson of the ABIM Foundation mentioned that Project Vectr is affiliated with the CDC during the Zoom webinar.

The Virality Project

The Virality Project was also mentioned by journalist Matt Taibbi during the Twitter Hearings on March 9, 2023, as being directly connected to the government, and actively squashing true stories of vaccine injuries.

Efforts to Control the Narrative

The above organizations and the foundations that fund them are spending millions of dollars to prod humanity towards enthusiastically accepting repeated vaccinations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation have been inserting themselves into public health agencies for decades and have held solid control over the conversation and methods surrounding public health measures.

A journalist named Anne Emmanuel-Birn published a paper in the International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations back in 1996 titled “Public health or public menace? The Rockefeller Foundation and public health in Mexico, 1920–1950″. The article details how The Rockefeller Foundation gained a strong foothold in the Mexican Government using public health initiatives.

One hundred years later, the means for control over public health have significantly expanded due to technology and digital identities. At the same time, the means for communication among the people have expanded far beyond a level the medical establishment can control. We as a society appear to be at a place where giant medical corporations and public health agencies have a vaccine to get to everyone, rivers of money and a major head start in the Information War, waging a propaganda campaign the likes of which the world had never seen before.

New Media 

The new media landscape has exploded since COVID hit. Alternative platforms, underground social media groups, and new video platforms facilitated a way for the Covid Dissidents to communicate after being exiled from the mainstream conversation. The medical establishment appears to be at a loss for how to respond. Pharma-adjacent foundations are throwing huge sums of money that trickle down through organizations and land up in Zoom webinars of fully-entrenched members of the medical establishment who receive funding to gaslight the public and create business proposals that discuss commenting on social media threads. The organizations that are set up to combat misinformation are in major defense mode, as they scramble to gain their footing within a media landscape they don’t even begin to understand.

The Webinar 

All of the above is the background and context for the environment within which these organizations operate. The ABIM Foundation Zoom Webinar provides a glimpse into the psyche of the people who are willing to play the pharma game, and the tactics they use to attempt to gain their footing online.

Clip 3: The Tactics

Dr. David Scales discussed how they use language, how they appoint representatives for certain communities, and how they “reframe” the conversation surrounding vaccines.

• The Language of the Community
  Dr. Scales emphasized the importance of having people who look and speak like specific communities represent the pro-vaccine push, particularly “Black and Latin-X communities” as he stated.

  “Our primary focus has been on vaccine hesitancy. So we are working in online communities that are aiming towards Black and LatinX populations in online spaces, to try to address some of the misinformation that tends to propagate in these online spaces”

  (Editorial translation: “Those communities can’t figure out what to think on their own, we need to tell them.”
  Why does Dr. Scales appear to be so racist?)

• Reframe the Conversation
  In what can only be described as a condescending manner, Dr. Scales explained that he and his colleagues try to reframe the conversation around vaccines using a method called “motivational interviewing” that’s used to convince new mothers to vaccinate their babies.

“One example of that is that we sometimes ‘reframe’ the way people talk about things. For example, if someone says like, ‘I’m not going to get the vaccine because I’m so sick of all these vaccine mandates and no one can tell me what to do with my body’, one of the things that we do is try to reframe that and say ‘absolutely, and it’s really important that you’re thinking about this in this way, because the vaccines really affect all of us’.
And we try to affirm that self-efficacy, that we are kind of able to make our own decisions about our health, but then we reframe a little bit, and say something like ‘I can understand your concerns about kind of, freedom, or vaccine side effects, or whatever‘.”

This video notes the eerie similarities in Dr. Scales’ tone of voice when he discusses vaccine injuries to that of Dr Vinny Arora, Dean for Medical Education at University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine during the previous month’s Building Trust Webinar:

Clip 4: Social Media Interventions

Dr. Hussain Lalani spent a few minutes discussing “social media interventions”, which is his term for making pro-vaccine comments online. He discussed the need to operate within the framework and the algorithm of each social media company, and noted that many things that go viral are things that are “not true”.

“When you try to do a social media intervention that is based upon the structural design of the platform. And you’re trying to sort of utilize what you know about the algorithms, what goes viral, to sort of to you know, utilize them to your benefit. And oftentimes the sort of elements of what makes something go viral are utilized very well and correlated well with things that aren’t necessarily true. But at the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do without having structural policy reforms in a space that’s actually a private platform. Even though it feels like the real world, and public discourse, it’s not really… There’s going to be a lot of reckoning coming soon in the next couple months, in the next year or so, when it comes to regulating these companies”

He called for a public reckoning in order to TIGHTEN social media controls over “misinformation”, and directs people to Shots Heard Round the World if they need a rapid response to an online anti-vaccine “attack by real or fake people”.

Clip 5: Building Trust, and an Interesting Public Comment 

During the Zoom Webinar, Dr. Lalani discussed how important it is to build trust, and how important it is to cultivate trust in online communities as well as in the real world. During this segment, there was a live chat comment from someone in the audience (viewable to everyone in the webinar) that appeared to appeal to the panelists’ sense of authority, while dropping in a major vaccine red flag as quoted by the Florida attorney general. The comment read as follows:

“Thank you for your work. How can we respond to people who ask about, for example, that the Florida Surgeon General came out today with a report that life-threatening events were elevated by over 4000% since the COVID vaccine came out? How do we respond when this information comes from a public health official?”

If you pay close attention after that comment pops up in the video, you can see a lot of shifty eyes and nervous looks. The panel ignored the comment on the live stream, but Dr. David Scales responded to the commenter in the chat. His comment said:

“I like to draw from Lisa Harris’s “danger talk” framework when communicating around contentious issues: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953617302964″

The article Dr. Scales referred to as a response to the question about the Florida VAERS data was published in 2017 in a journal called Science Direct. The article is called “Dangertalk: Voices of Abortion Providers” and it discusses the phenomenon of self-censorship among abortion providers, and lists appropriate narratives to use when discussing abortion that will “evoke sympathy”. The article states that one reason abortion providers don’t discuss the details of their work is to protect the pro-choice movement by not giving the pro-life crowd any fodder.

A parallel between the topics of discussing abortion details and discussing vaccine injuries can clearly be drawn from Dr. Scales recommendation for this article. In other words, just like they don’t discuss details of abortion because it will harm the pro-choice movement, they also don’t discuss vaccine injuries, because it’s harmful to the pro-vaccine movement. Instead, they use language that will “evoke sympathy”, like protecting grandmothers. 

Watch this clip here, and look out for the comment and the reaction.

Clip 6: “We’re Building the Ship as We’re Flying It”

In this clip, Dr. Scales discussed the shaky landscape of information. He said:

“We’re building the ship as we’re flying it. And so, trying to wait the few years it might take to do randomized control trials is just not the environment we’re in. So we’ve taken the approach that we really need to just start working in this space and then try to do the best evaluation that we can so we can iterate and try to improve on the intervention that we’re doing”.

Mr. Wolfson then asks if there’s been an increase in misinformation since the Elon Twitter Takeover, although he was careful not to specify Twitter by name.

“Given the policies of unspecified social media heads have you been seeing an increase in misinformation in recent days?”

Dr. Scales responded yes and didn’t hesitate to name Twitter and Facebook.

“It depends on the platform, but the short answer is yes. In the sense that Twitter especially has changed some of its parameters and there’s a lot more not so much misinformation, but I would say the tenor of the conversation has changed and is much more combative. Facebook is also changing some of its content moderation. There were some content moderation policies that were in place during the pandemic, and it seems like social media companies are very interested in taking those down, which in my opinion would be premature.”

Dr. Lalani called it a “cesspool out there”, with an increase in “hate speech and discrimination and false information flying around”.

Clip 7: Infodemics and Infodemiologists

Dr. Scales talked about “Infodemics”, a term coined in 2003 by David J Rothkopf in The Washington Post. He said that similar to epidemics, infodemics are when information seeds through the population through social media. Dr. Scales published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “The Covid-19 Infodemic — Applying the Epidemiologic Model to Counter Misinformation”. The article was co-written with Mr. Jack Gorman, CEO of Critica Science. 

The article states:

“The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s tracking of social and legacy media has found that millions of people have been exposed to deceptive material alleging that SARS-CoV-2 is a hoax or that experts are exaggerating its severity and the extent of its spread, that masks are ineffective or increase infection risk, or that Covid-19 vaccines cause the disease, alter the recipient’s DNA, or include tracking devices. Believing such claims is associated with a lower likelihood of engaging in preventive behavior and a lower willingness to be vaccinated.^1“

Dr. Scales and Dr. Lalani both strongly advocated for better communications classes in medical school, to teach future doctors how to communicate with their patients and handle “misinformation”.

There was a lot to unpack in that meeting. The full video is on the Building Trust website, along with past webinars.

The people on the front lines of the mRNA vaccine propaganda machine are wrapped in a web of conflicts of interest, and funding from the industry that’s focused on jabbing every arm. Beware of the REAL misinformation spreaders.

My Notes:

• After diving into this subject for the past few weeks, it’s clear that we are, indeed, suffering through an “infodemic”. The infodemic is perpetrated by a handful of powerful global corporate entities all of whom have a narrative and a product that they are hell-bent on selling to the global population, at any cost.
• The flippant way in which vaccine injuries and medical freedom are discussed by the Misinformation Busters is eery.
• This meeting was held in Feb 2023, and Dr. Scales is STILL trying to sell the idea that one who gets the vaccine can save his grandmother.
• The Misinformation Busters are really bad at their jobs. The practice of medicine self-selects for obedience, and with that obedience often comes a rigid and practical way of thinking. The team of people trying to capture the attention and sway the opinions of the masses is hopelessly boring and doesn’t understand current social media culture or the landscape of New Media.
• Despite many millions of dollars pointed toward the effort to keep control over the narrative, the Misinformation Busters are clearly losing. They’re lying about vaccine injuries, dismissive of people’s bodily autonomy, and by peddling years of lies they’ve destroyed their own credibility.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Don’t get fooled by the Infodemic perpetrated by the Misinformation Busters. 

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Etana Hecht is an American-Israeli investigative journalist, and Associate Editor at DailyClout. She lives in Israel with her husband and three kids. Etana’s articles can all be found at clownworldhonk.com

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