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Will the Covid Vaccine Meet Its Quixotic Promises?

by Richard Gale and Gary Null
Progressive Radio Network

Jan. 8, 2021

Daily we hear and observe a stream of endless propaganda about the miracles of the new generation of Covid vaccines in order to calm fears and increase public compliance.

In unison, editors at the New York Times, Washington Post and the major multimedia networks encourage everyone to be vaccinated as soon as enough vaccines are available.

Anthony Fauci and the captains in the pandemic efforts claim Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines are about 95 percent effective, and the Department of Health and Human Services is convincing us they are safe and effective. 

Therefore, we should all be willing to stand in the waiting line. There is nothing to be concerned about, we are told, except those anti-vaccine heretics, who the World Health Organization has now dubbed among the ten most dangerous risks to global health.  

What the media blitzkrieg is ignoring are the very legitimate and even worrisome unanswered questions

What the media blitzkrieg is ignoring are the very legitimate and even worrisome unanswered questions on the minds of many citizens.

Aside from concerns over these vaccines’ uncertainties for effectiveness and safety due to quickly being fast-tracked past the usual regulatory analyses and reviews, Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines are largely experimental.

Never before has an mRNA vaccine been distributed en masse to tens of millions of people.

Other suspicions include 1) the length of time neutralizing antibodies are effective before immunity wanes, 2) what kind of protection the vaccines will actually offer, 3) does the data truly support Moderna and Pfizer claims that their vaccines are 95 percent effective, 4) are vaccine recipients protected from contracting the virus, and if not, can they transmit it to others, and 5) the absence of long-term safety profiles following vaccination that are still pending.

The Pfizer Phase 3 trial lasted less than 4 months. Moderna only completed its COVE trial enrollment on October 22; now two months later people are receiving the vaccine.

Therefore, insufficient time has lapsed to make any realistic clinical determination about either vaccine’s safety following months after vaccination.

Yet despite these questions, over half of Americans believe that being vaccinated will provide complete immunity from infection and therefore their lives will return to normal.

New discrimination against unvaccinated?

Now the most recent narrative we are witnessing is stoking public fear that unless we are vaccinated we will be unable to board a plane or train, will be prevented from attending schools or public events, and may even become victims to more austere and harsh quarantine laws.

There is also the lingering myth of the PCR test as a reliable standard for diagnosing Covid infections. Due to the widespread abuse of PCR, which was never designed nor intended to be relied upon as a confirmatory diagnostic tool, a growing number of medical experts argue that the US, the UK, Germany and other EU nations are facing a “casedemic” rather than a pandemic due to a pathogenic virus.

Despite PCR’s high rate of misdiagnoses, positive results are still being reported as Covid cases. 

How much protection will the new mRNA Covid vaccines provide and for how long?

In early December, the New England Journal of Medicine published a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease analysis of the Moderna vaccine’s length of efficacy based upon neutralizing antibody levels.

This was the first data published of its kind for any of the Covid vaccines.

Although the analysis only included 34 individuals who had received both shots, it found that antibody counts were significant over a 3-month period, averaging between 50-75 percent.

The report stated this was “less than we were hoping for.” 

The rate of antibody decline increased among the older trial participants. 

This disappointing result should not be a surprise, although even a sharp drop in antibodies may still provide sufficient immunity, at least for some. 

The most recent issue of the British Medical Journal reports that natural immunity following infection lasts approximately 6 months. Yet this study conducted by Oxford University Hospitals likely has serious flaws since it relied upon PCR for diagnosing the data. 

Furthermore, Moderna has also been using its mRNA technology for vaccines against several influenza strains. A similar pattern of antibody decline was noted in their flu vaccines, showing effectiveness for about 6 months and then an antibody drop by as much 90 percent. 

So how much protection will the new mRNA Covid vaccines provide and for how long? Only time and further monitoring of vaccine recipients will tell. 

Can one still be infected after vaccination and can they transmit the virus to others?

Another important question on people’s minds is whether they can still be infected after vaccination and whether they can transmit the virus to others. In principle, vaccine proponents argue that vaccines prevent both infection and transmission. 

But the data does not support this conclusion.

It is well known that persons vaccinated against the flu will frequently contract the virus, become ill and spread it to others. This is largely because we are dealing with viruses that enter the upper respiratory tract by way of the mucous layer in the nose and throat. 

Mucous itself slows down the spread of the virus to the lungs. However, it is also an obstacle for antibodies and immune cells, such as T-cells, from reaching the multiplying virus. 

For this reason, Anthony Fauci has continued to state that vaccinated persons should continue to wear masks and observe social distancing to avoid transmitting the virus. The World Health Organization has stated that there is no “evidence on any of the vaccines to be confident that it’s going to prevent people from actually getting the infection and therefore being able to pass it on.”

95 percent efficacy?

Back in October, Dr. Peter Doshi, at the time an editor for the British Medical Journal, had already warned that the later vaccine clinical trials were never properly designed to determine whether it would reduce the likelihood of falling ill nor preventing infection.

In a later article Doshi questions the vaccines’ purported 95 percent efficacy based upon how the results are being reported and the ambiguity between “suspected” and “confirmed” Covid cases among the trial participants who received the vaccine. 

If the “suspected” cases are included, there is a 20-fold higher number of vaccinated individuals who later contracted the virus. 

However, Doshi reminds us that neither Pfizer nor Moderna have provided the raw data for public scrutiny.

Moderna says it will make the data available after the trial is completed, which will be in 2022. 

Repeatedly Bill Gates, Fauci and all of the media pundits tell us that unless there is large vaccination compliance, the transmission of Covid will never be interrupted. However, based upon what we are learning, these new Covid vaccines have always been and remain an unsupported illusion to realistically end the pandemic. 

Another important piece of information that is very rarely mentioned is Covid-19’s 4-5 day incubation period. In the event a person is asymptomatically infected with the virus, the CDC states,

“mRNA vaccines are not currently recommended for outbreak management or for post-exposure prophylaxis, which is vaccination to prevent the development of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a person with a specific known exposure. Because the median incubation period of SARS-CoV-2 is 4 to 5 days, it is unlikely that the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine would provide an adequate immune response within the incubation period for effective post-exposure prophylaxis. Thus, vaccination is unlikely to be effective in preventing disease following an exposure.”

Reports are already coming in to confirm this.

Recently, hundreds of Israelis became infected with the virus after receiving Pfizer’s Covid vaccine. There may be several reasons for this. 

First, were the vaccine recipients already carrying the virus at the time of vaccination? Second, it takes 8-10 days for immunity to sufficiently increase after receiving the vaccine, and after the first dose there is only about 50 percent efficacy. This is why the second shot for the mRNA vaccines is so critical in order to reach the magical 95 percent effectiveness. 

Serious adverse effects

Now that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are being administered throughout the US – 4.6 million recipients since January 4^th – and in other nations, we are beginning to read reports about serious adverse effects.

Recently Covid vaccine injuries have started to be reported in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

During a seven-day period, December 15-22, there were 1,158 cases entered. However, this is but a fraction, albeit significant, of the actual number of adverse events.

On December 19, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices convened to review the cases of life-threatening anaphylaxis following mRNA vaccination.

In his presentation to the Working Group, Dr. Thomas Clark presented statistics showing that there was a minimum of 3,150 “health impact events” among 112,807 vaccine recipients (2.7 percent) during only a five-day period (December 14-18). 

Moreover, these 3,150 adverse events were tagged as “unable to perform normal daily activities, unable to work, required care from a doctor or health care professional.” 

The presentation did not include the number of minor and moderate adverse events which are likely much higher. 

Reproductive Issues?

In early October we reported on Covid-19 vaccine risks stated by Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, the former chair of microbiology at the University of Mainz Medical School in Germany.

Among those risks is the possibility of the vaccine’s mRNA contributing to mutogenesis in reproductive cells that may be inherited later by children.

Subsequently, the University of Miami has reported it is following up on its earlier discovery of the virus present in men’s testicles up to six months after infection.

Now the researchers are investigating whether the vaccine’s Covid genetic information may do likewise and interfere with sperm quality and reproduction. 

What about the precautionary principle?

The final question is why are we failing to discuss, let alone adhere, to the precautionary principle before this massive undertaking to produce and distribute potentially billions of vaccines to inoculate the global population?

The precautionary principle quite simply states that any new medical intervention with results that are either disputed or unknown should be avoided.

In fact, the principle has frequently been invoked for products or processes that would introduce genetically modified organisms or foods for consumption.

Now we are injecting questionable genetically engineered substances into human bodies, and worse there are voices that want to mandate this enormously expensive experiment long before any reliable medical consensus can be reached on their long-term safety. 

If the precautionary principle had been respected and honored during the past 100 years, the US would have prevented untold numbers of life-long injuries and deaths due to the public advertising of smoking, asbestos and DDT poisoning, synthetic hormone replacement, toxic pesticides such as Monsanto’s glyphosate, AZT during the early part of the AIDS epidemic, and the swine flu and Gardasil vaccines that were also rushed to market without proper scientific oversight. 

The US government has an atrocious track record for introducing toxic chemicals to the American public then denying all responsibility for their adverse effects

The US government has an atrocious track record for introducing toxic chemicals to the American public then denying all responsibility for their adverse effects and the indescribable suffering that their shortsightedness has caused.

It is only well after the tragedy gains some public attention that a whistleblower or someone “in the know” comes forward to reveal the wrongdoings and corruption behind the companies developing these toxic products.

And how often do we find the government, the regulatory agencies and mainstream media being the primary source to expose these felonies? Rarely ever.

Even when protective laws are enacted, such as the Clean Air, Food, Water and Energy acts, corporate lobbyists and big money apply their trade to buy off legislators and heads of federal agencies to gradually scrub away these laws’ safeguards. This is part of the corporate cancel culture to erase our protections. 

Today’s largest propaganda campaign

These trends that have become ingrained into the government’s politick have led to today’s largest propaganda campaign in the country’s history and is now orchestrated by the CDC and NIH in collusion with the pharmaceutical industrial complex, Bill Gates, many of our leading corporate-funded medical schools and institutions and across the ideological spectrum of the media.

All are heavily invested in the new generations of Covid vaccines and whatever new novel drugs in the pipeline and to invalidate the highly effective and cheap drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and invermectin, that have been proven to treat Covid infections quickly and safety. 

This is the same artifice of corporate scoundrels and their media escorts that have relied on faulty science, fabricate their own research to serve their financial interests, and hide behind a cloak of non-transparency who Fauci now encourages us to openheartedly trust as Covid vaccines reach your local clinics and downtown pharmacies.  

Sadly their past track records of colluding and showing favoritism to private interests over public health should top the list of our worries. 

Whatever the long term consequences from this massive vaccination campaign, praise, condemnation or even criminal accusations will ultimately rest upon the shoulders of our nation’s Anthony Fauci-s, Bill Gates and Moncef-s.

About the Authors

Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is the host of America’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including War on Health and more recently Last Call for Tomorrow.

________________________

For more:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2020/12/21/warning-3150-injuries-in-1st-week-of-covid-vaccines-among-american-healthcare-workers-pregnant-women-included/  I’ve included an ongoing list of deaths and severe reactions caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.

For an excellent article on the importance of needing raw data:  https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/peter-doshi-pfizer-moderna-vaccines-need-more-details-raw-data/

Excerpts:

With 20 times more suspected than confirmed cases, this category of disease cannot be ignored simply because there was no positive PCR test result. Indeed this makes it all the more urgent to understand. A rough estimate of vaccine efficacy against developing COVID-19 symptoms, with or without a positive PCR test result, would be a relative risk reduction of 19% (see footnote)—far below the 50% effectiveness threshold for authorization set byregulators. Even after removing cases occurring within 7 days of vaccination (409 on Pfizer’s vaccine vs. 287 on placebo), which should include the majority of symptoms due to short-term vaccine reactogenicity, vaccine efficacy remains low: 29% (see footnote).

If many or most of these suspected cases were in people who had a false negative PCR test result, this would dramatically decrease vaccine efficacy. But considering that influenza-like illnesses have always had myriad causes—rhinoviruses, influenza viruses, other coronaviruses, adenoviruses, respiratory syncytial virus, etc.—some or many of the suspected COVID-19 cases may be due to a different causative agent.

Addressing the many open questions about these trials requires access to the raw trial data. But no company seems to have shared data with any third party at this point.

• Pfizer‘s data will not be available until 24 months after study completion.
• Moderna‘s data won’t come out for two years.
• Oxford’s/AstraZeneca’s data won’t be available until the trail is complete.
• Russian Sputnik V vaccine has NO plans to share participant data.

This is probably the largest experiment ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.

As pandemic countermeasures obliterate the middle class and civil rights, Silicon Valley’s billionaire robber barons are cashing in on the global economic collapse and the rise of the surveillance state.

Now, one of these tech titans — a man with deep ties to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — has claimed the golden ring: the key contract to manage all the personal, health and financial data that will allow government and industry to keep us in line as they build their New World Order.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will curate the vast datasets that house our medical, financial and personal information enabling Big Brother to track and trace our movements, our purchases, our preferences and our vulnerabilities, and use that information to control civil populations, suppress dissent and punish disobedience.

Ellison, whose estimated net worth of $87.7 billion makes him the seventh-richest individual in the world, has just achieved a long-sought milestone. On Dec.15, Oracle, the tech company Ellison founded in 1977 with help from the CIA, issued a press release announcing it “will serve as the CDC’s [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] central data repository for all vaccination data in the U.S. This ‘national clearing house’ system will receive data from all U.S. jurisdictions administering vaccinations.”

Almost 20 years since Ellison, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, offered the government a proposal for a national security database “that collected everything possible to identify someone,” the mogul appears to finally be sitting on cloud nine.

Oracle’s National Electronic Health Records Cloud dates back to the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, a couple of weeks after letting President Trump use his estate near Palm Springs for a $100,000-a-plate golfing fundraiser, Ellison placed a call to the White House. According to a Forbes cover story on Ellison, he “asked Trump if a clearinghouse existed for real-time data about treatment efficacies and outcomes.”

Within a week after the president asked “how much?” and Ellison said, “for free,” the tech titan had brought together a team of Oracle engineers “to build a database and website registering coronavirus cases” and work with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies.

The first public acknowledgment of Oracle’s progress came on July 3, 2020, when the NIH’s National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci, launched the COVID-19 Prevention Trials Network (COVPN), aimed at enrolling thousands of volunteers in large-scale trials for a variety of investigational vaccines and monoclonal antibodies.

Fauci achieved this by merging four existing networks, all researching HIV/AIDS, something they would continue to do. “The network is expected to operate more than 100 clinical trial sites across the United States and internationally,” according to the NIAID press release which also stated “the COVPN website features a customized data collection platform, which Oracle (Redwood Shores, CA) built and donated, to securely identify potential trial participants.”

In August, a paper published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security proposed that the “passive reporting” systems managed by the CDC and FDA ought to be revamped to forge “an active safety surveillance system directed by the CDC that monitors all [COVID-19] vaccine recipients — perhaps by short message service or other electronic mechanisms.”

By September, Operation Warp Speed director Moncef Slaoui was telling the periodical Science: “We’re working super hard on a very active pharmacovigilance system, to make sure that when the vaccines are introduced that we’ll absolutely continue to assess their safety.

In October, Slaoui told the New York Times: “The FDA is proposing that at least 50% of the individuals in the study population have at least two months of follow-up on safety before the vaccines are approved. And secondly, we are working really hard with the FDA and the CDC to make sure we have a very active pharmacovigilance surveillance system to allow us to continue to assess the safety of the vaccines as they are being used in the high risk population.”

And the Wall Street Journal reported in a profile of Slaoui that he’d said “tracking systems will have to be ‘incredibly precise’ to ensure that patients each get two doses of the same vaccine and to monitor them for adverse health effects. Operation Warp Speed has selected the medical-distribution company McKesson and cloud operators Google and Oracle to collect and track vaccine data.”

This marked the first time that Oracle’s role was revealed to have expanded to include Operation Warp Speed.

Oracle Chairman Ellison’s lucrative government arrangements trace back to the data software pioneer’s origins. In 1975, then in his early thirties, Ellison worked on a project for the electronics company Ampex in the Bay area, building a large terabit memory system for the CIA.

Ellison revealed in 2014 that the CIA not only became his firm’s first customer for a “relational database” two years later, but that he adopted the name from a CIA project called Oracle. “The news about our hot little database traveled around the intelligence community pretty quickly,” Ellison was quoted as saying in the 2003 book, “Softwar.” “In a little over six months’ time we had won several deals — the CIA, Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and the NSA [National Security Agency].”

By the turn of the millennium, Oracle had fought off competition from IBM and Microsoft to reach the financial pinnacle of database management. Two days after 9/11, Ellison met with NSA Director Michael Hayden to talk about his proposed data surveillance system. He then went to see Attorney General John Ashcroft to discuss an idea for a national identification card.

Writing an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal (October 18, 2001), Ellison reminded readers that the government already maintained thousands of databases to keep track of people as well as issuing IDs like Social Security cards and driver’s licenses. Ellison wrote:

“The single thing we could do to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was integrated into a single national file. My company … has already offered to provide the necessary software for free … It’s important these donations be made with no strings attached. The database would be maintained and run by the government alone, with no question of corporations benefiting … The good news is that a national database combined with biometrics, thumb prints, hand prints, iris scans or other new technology could detect false identities … We don’t need to trade our liberties for our lives.”

In a follow-up op-ed for the New York Times in January 2002, Ellison thought this could be achieved in a few months because it was “technically simple. All we have to do is copy information from the hundreds of separate law enforcement databases into a single database.”

In April 2002, along with Ashcroft, Ellison was a named recipient of an annual “Big Brother Award” presented by Privacy International to the most notorious individuals who had done the most to threaten such liberties.

By 2003, as the Patriot Act brought an explosion in surveillance and data mining, the federal government accounted for about one-fourth of Oracle’s billions in revenue.

“The information about your banks, your checking balances, your saving balance is stored in an Oracle database,” Ellison was quoted in the 2004 book, “The Naked Crowd.” “Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database …Privacy is already gone.”

That same year, Ashcroft — godfather of the Patriot Act — sued Oracle to prevent its acquisition of a multibillion-dollar intelligence contract. But after Ashcroft resigned from the second Bush administration, he founded a lobbying firm which Oracle then hired in 2005, allowing The Ashcroft Group to hit the ground running. With the group’s help, Oracle went on to acquire the contract.

One program that didn’t last long was called Total Information Awareness (TIA), overseen by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which would later become a primary funder of COVID-19 vaccine developer Moderna and other of Fauci’s favored companies.

DARPA had conceived of TIA some years earlier. In addition to what Ellison specified needing, TIA wanted to collect Americans’ medical records, drug prescriptions and even DNA, maintaining that the whole population needed surveillance to prevent not only future terrorist attacks, but bioterrorism and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks.

Citizens’ financial, travel and media consumption habits would also be managed in a “public-private partnership” with the NSA, CIA, private sector and academia. In a mirrored scenario to that now surrounding the pandemic, the “invisible enemy” could be conquered.

But the backlash was swift. The ACLU called TIA

“the closest thing to a true ‘Big Brother’ program that has ever been seriously contemplated in the United States. It is based on a vision of pulling together as much information as possible about as many people as possible into an ‘ultra-large-scale’ database.”

A year after its formation by DARPA, Congress defunded TIA in January 2003.

But TIA never really went away. Various of its programs ended up divvied into a web of military and intelligence programs.

In 2013, Ellison told CBS News that the NSA’s domestic spying program was “essential.” A revolving door between Oracle and the CIA, which began with Ellison himself, went on to include Leon Panetta, CIA director and then Defense Secretary under Obama, who joined Oracle’s board in 2015.

Oracle Labs, the research arm, invested in a partnership with DARPA toward “a vision for a ‘macrochip,’ an optically interconnected supercomputer.”

As the FDA revved toward emergency use approval for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines late in 2020, linkages between the CIA and the Big Tech companies escalated simultaneously. An earlier agency contract had gone to Amazon in 2013, but on Nov. 20, it was reported that the CIA “has awarded its long-awaited Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, contract to five companies – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.” These companies “will compete for specific task orders issued by the CIA on behalf of itself and the 16 other agencies that comprise the intelligence community.” At the moment, “Microsoft is the competitor closest to attaining authorization to host top-secret data.”

Procurement documents issued by the CIA in 2019 indicated the expected value of the C2E contract could be worth tens of billions over the next decade-and-a- half.

Then in mid-December, Oracle issued a press release that said:

“By working collaboratively with the CDC and the U.S. Department of Defense during the pandemic, Oracle was able to extend the capabilities of the Public Health Management Applications Suite to help manage nationwide distribution and to collect patient data around COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.”

Moving well beyond its original sketchy mandate with Fauci’s NIAID, not only would Oracle’s National Electronic Health Records Cloud be the CDC’s new central data repository for vaccination data, but the company said it was:

“currently in discussions with dozens of countries around the world to adopt Oracle’s Public Health Management Applications Suite to modernize their national public health infrastructure and thus enable efficient COVID-19 vaccine distribution, therapeutic monitoring and diagnostic testing … This is just the beginning.”

It had been a productive and ultimately very profitable year for Ellison and Oracle. Also in mid-December, Ellison announced that his company was leaving Silicon Valley for a new headquarters in Austin, Texas, while he himself was moving to the Lanai Hawaiian island that he owned. Ellison had stepped down as Oracle CEO in 2014, but stayed on as chief technical officer. At the start of the pandemic, on March 23, his stock in the company (and he owned 35 percent of it) had dropped 11 percent. But shortly before he closed the government deal collecting all the vaccine data, his fortune rose $2.5 billion in a single week, bringing Ellison’s net worth to an estimated $81.5 billion.

This was despite a delay in his pending buy-in to the global social media platform TikTok, “an app for teens, filled with goofy dancing and lip-synching videos” as the Wall Street Journal described it — but a highly lucrative, and controversial, one.

Last spring, around the time he started calling COVID-19 the “China virus,” President Trump had ordered TikTok’s Chinese parent company Bytedance to either sell its American operation or be banned on U.S. shores, because the data it gathered somehow threatened national security. Suddenly Microsoft, Twitter and Oracle were reportedly negotiating bids to China’s billionaire entrepreneur Zhang Yming.

One aspect of TikTok that would doubtless have interested Ellison is the app’s use of artificial intelligence to shoot people news based upon their reading habits. “Powered by algorithms that can make its video feed addictive,” TikTok had turned into a global sensation, downloaded more than 2 billion times worldwide and with a $100 billion valuation. For more than a year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, “the app tracked users using a tactic banned by Google, which enabled it to collect unique identifiers from millions of mobile devices without letting users opt out.” While TikTok said it had stopped the practice and “promised to create a firewall between China and overseas users,” that’s apparently why Trump got so worried about possible Chinese government access to TikTok’s American user data.

In September 2020, Oracle announced it had reached agreement with TikTok for a 12.5 percent stake in the U.S. operation while also providing cloud services and security for the app. Walmart bought an additional 7.5 percent, and Trump declared victory for the new TikTok Global, which will likely go public once the dust settles and the sales are approved by the U.S. and China.

“Oracle hopes to use the TikTok deal as another model to provide security and cloud services to other companies down the road,” CNBC reported in September. Or, as happened less than two months later, to the federal government.

Could there have been an ulterior motive behind Oracle’s plunge into kiddie social media? At the end of August, the Journal of Adolescent Health published an article headlined “Tik Tok and Its Role in Covid-19 Information Propagation.” The NIH website would reprint it in November. Noting that the pandemic had generated the near-complete sudden closure of U.S. educational institutions in the spring,

“noneducational screen time among young people has greatly escalated” and “social media have played a large role in youth resocialization in a pandemic society … Given social media’s ability to propagate factually inaccurate medical information at an alarming rate,” and given TikTok’s more than 45.6 million active users in the U.S., the paper’s authors decided to analyze the 100 most popular videos earmarked with hashtags for COVID-19 and coronavirus.

These had reached as many as 93.1 billion views, “demonstrating the platform’s immense ability to encourage sharing.” Only a handful seemed to have provided misleading information, while “videos by healthcare professionals were few in number … [but] often among the most widely ‘liked’ and shared across the board. The distribution suggests that demand on TikTok for more healthcare-related voices currently outpaces supply. TikTok has shown itself to be a viable means for practitioners to educate and dispel myths about COVID-19 to a broad and diverse adolescent demographic,” according to the article.

Some in the public health community took notice.

“A growing number of scientists and doctors are making viral videos on TikTok to provide information on COVID-19 vaccines,” Scripps reported on Jan. 1. The group called itself Team Halo, with a goal “to try and reduce hesitancy.”

One of the “dozens of health experts from all over the world,” director of the Harvard Immunology Graduate Program, Dr. Shiv Pillai, went into a great deal about the messenger mRNA used to develop the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, explaining “why it’s safe and effective, as well as the side effects that would be simple to pinpoint.” Pillaj used poetry to get his message across: “The vaccine it will change our lives. To get a shot is to be smart. To make this virus bite the dust, let us all just do our part.”

According to Scripps, in other videos, Pillai talks about a child he treated as an intern. The boy died in his hands from tetanus because he wasn’t vaccinated.