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In the Washington Department of Health (DOH) 2023-25 Biennial Budget Proposal submitted to the Office of Financial Management (OFM), the agency is asking for an “approximate” $35 million ($7 million per year) to implement and run a five-year campaign to focus on rebuilding Washington’s trust in public health and display the value that “public health provides the people we serve.”

2023-25 Budget Proposal | Washington State Department of Health

Restore TRUST to Public Health Info (wa.gov)

After their summary, the DOH uses three paragraphs to state the problem. The most noteworthy one is the second paragraph:

Over the past six years, misinformation/disinformation has spread rampant throughout the nation. Over the last two years in Washington, DOH saw firsthand the impact of these disinformation campaigns through audience research, ongoing polls, and community feedback. As a result, some people have become more likely to believe something false from a friend or family member than something true from the government, which in some cases, leads to decisions to not access lifesaving public health services.

The gist of the DOH’s five-paragraph proposal is in the second paragraph. The most telling statement is the paragraph’s opening sentence:

The effectiveness of any public health intervention depends on the ability to influence the specific audience’s behavior.

Other terms for intentional influencing of behavior is social-engineering, or propaganda. Never a good idea to empower and fund government agencies to undertake such campaigns.

The rest of the paragraph reads as follows:

The basis of a person’s decision to practice a positive health affirming habit is rooted in their ability to trust the source of information, messenger, and research. Since the early 2000s, public health has seen a reduction in childhood immunizations due to the spread of dis/misinformation, which argues that vaccines contribute to autism. We witnessed the negative impact that COVID-19 dis/information has on people practicing risk reduction behaviors, such as masking, social distances, and receiving vaccinations.

Aside from autism, public health officials never describe any information they consider to be misinformation. What is this mountain of information they rage against? It would be helpful if they actually specified, and if they would agree to have open and civil dialogue about it.

It would also be helpful if they read the full body of science on the association between autism and vaccination so that we could engage in real scientific debate. A director of the CDC admitted that vaccines can cause autism, and some of their top scientists stated in the conclusion of a study,

“It can be argued that ASD with regression, in which children usually lose developmental skills during the second year of life, could be related to exposures in infancy, including vaccines”.

But DOH is uninterested in nuance. The last paragraph of the proposal furthered the DOH’s campaign of fear:

Should this proposal not be funded, public health may not have the opportunity to counteract the negative perception of public health’s ability to protect and promote health, which in turn could risk that when the next big public health event occurs, DOH will have even less trust from the public, and it will be even more difficult to promote certain life-saving behaviors.

Like lockdowns, masking, experimental gene therapies. They consider these to correspond with health, despite much data and published studies to the contrary (Explore Brownstone for specific topics.)

As of April 10, 2023, the budget requests comparison for the biennial budget shows that the governor’s office and the senate have agreed on the amount of allocating $117,000 in state funds and $240,000 in other funds, totaling $357,000, for booster vaccine incentives.

2023-25 Budget Requests (wa.gov)

“Misinformation” Discussed at VAC Meeting

After the public comment period at the April 13, 2023 Washington Vaccine Advisory Committee (VAC) meeting, committee member Tao Kwan-Gett said, “Hearing the public comments makes me reflect on the misinformation that is out there, and I wonder if that might be a possible topic for us to consider on how we might combat misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.”

He did not state what comments he specifically considered to be misinformation.

The newest committee member, Dr. Gretchen LaSalle, MD, who is a board-certified family physician, agreed. “This being sort of my passion is working with folks who have misinformation about vaccines is that we should continue to focus on that, even two-plus years into the pandemic,” she said. “There's still a lot of misinformation out there.”

Ironically, during the public comment period, a fellow physician, who is now retired, offered the following views:

“I would like to express my strong opposition to the administration of the COVID-19 gene therapy for all patients, but especially for children. The COVID-19 gene therapy is neither safe nor effective. In fact, I would like to point out that listening to this entire meeting, the assumptions seem to be that these therapies are safe and effective when they are in fact, neither, but this is especially true for healthy children. Children are not at risk from hospitalization or death from COVID-19. If healthy children receive the COVID-19 gene therapy, they are at risk of serious adverse effects, including, but not limited to myocarditis. Even one case of myocarditis is too much. No one knows the long term effects of administering the COVID-19 gene therapy. Not one of the members of this board, nor anyone else. What's going to happen to these children in ten years? Thirty years? Is this body willing to assume responsibility for recommending the vaccine? Are they willing to do so when not knowing what's going to happen. I would also like to add that since you're thinking of expanding your committee members, you might consider expanding to some dissident voices, some voices who don't assume that everything is safe and effective, but rather look objectively at the data that is out there, such as the data mentioned by the previous speaker. There's plenty of data out there. Please don't ignore it.”

Another public comment was made by Be Brave Washington leader Natalie Chavez. She recommended five web sites to the committee and suggested that they read Cause Unknown.

"Cause Unknown": The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 (Children’s Health Defense) - Kindle edition by Dowd, Ed, Kennedy Jr., Robert F.. Professional & Technical Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

In the introduction to his book, Cause Unknown, the author, Edward Dowd, a former portfolio manager for Blackrock, best summarizes the phenomenon:

By 2017, around 2.8 million Americans died. 2018 was about the same again. 2019, about the same again. Not surprisingly, 2020 saw a spike, smaller than you might imagine, some of which could be attributed to COVID and to initial treatment strategies that were not effective.
But then, in 2021, the stats people expected went off the rails. The CEO of the OneAmerica insurance company publicly disclosed that during the third and fourth quarters of 2021, death in people of working age (18-64) was 40% higher than it was before the pandemic. Significantly, the majority of the deaths were not attributed to COVID.
A 40% increase in deaths is literally earth-shaking, and not only for the devastated families and communities that directly experience the deaths. Even a 10% increase in excess deaths would have been a 1-in-200-year event. But this was 40%. And therein lies a story – a story that starts with obvious questions: What has caused this historic spike in deaths among younger people?
What has caused the shift from old people, who are expected to die, to younger people, who are expected to keep living? It isn’t COVID, of course, because we know that COVID is not a significant cause of death in young people.

Chavez also said,

“So who is responsible and accountable for our community members who are vaccine injured? The countermeasures injury compensation program is a joke. COVID-19 vaccine injuries are real, not rare. I know a number of COVID-19 vaccine injured community members, which include my car repairman, a friend, and others who I have met at meetings.”

Informed Choice Washington volunteer Mike Johnson provided plenty of details about the COVID-19 shots. For starters, Johnson told them that Switzerland has withdrawn all COVID-19 shot recommendations and that physicians who prescribe the shots would need to carry the risk of liability in the case of adverse events. He added that the COVID-19 shots are designed to be effective against the original Wuhan strain, and the bivalent booster, designed to be effective against both the Wuhan strain and the omicron sub various BA 4 BA 5, is formulated to treat strains that are already extinct. He then pointed to the adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), including the 35,000-plus deaths as well as the 40 percent increase in all cause mortality being reported by life and disability insurance actuaries. “We need to halt these shots until our regulators can investigate and arrive at conclusions relative to the actual causes,” he said.

Another public commenter questioned the lack of information available to the public from the Washington Department of Health (DOH):

“My question is, how does the committee assess COVID-19 vaccine and its all cause mortality risk in Washington? I personally can't find any information on it on the DOH website. So I'm not sure that it's been publicly released during the COVID-19 vaccine era, which is 2021, 2022, and 2023. According to the CDC, the estimate for Washington all cause mortality has increased by about 16 percent during the pandemic, and given the known side effects of myocarditis, pericarditis, and other cardiovascular issues, especially in teenage boys, it seems important to look at the all cause mortality broken down by age, gender, and vaccination status to be monitoring for a long term safety signal. You know the risk of death from COVID-19 is quite low for healthy children and young adults, so that safety bar really needs to be very high. So how is the committee assessing the all cause mortality risk? And how about the DOH? When will you be releasing the data broken down by age, gender, and vaccination status? I feel like we get a lot of data that deals with effectiveness broken down in that way. And I haven't really seen any data that deals with safety. And given the short duration of the vaccine trials and the newness of the technology, it does seem prudent to be looking for a long-term safety signal in the all-caused mortality data. And so I'm concerned that we haven't gotten any going back to 2020.”

Apparently, the public comments were deemed “misinformation” by the VAC, which led to the propaganda buzzword “vaccine hesitancy,” and this was addressed by Heather Drummond during her COVID-19 vaccine director update when she discussed the success of Washington’s Power of Providers (POP) Initiative.

She told the committee the following:

“The initiative was launched in 2021 to partner with providers to better understand and overcome barriers to vaccination, to provide resources and education, and to help raise COVID-19 vaccination rates across Washington. There are over 70,000 providers represented in our POP network, and we continue to support providers through education, outreach, and resources. I’ll share a couple highlights of what POP is working on. Now we are developing new outreach postcards as seen here to increase awareness about POP and it's Spanish language resources to enable providers to better serve Spanish speaking residents. POP also holds and will continue to hold regular educational webinars, including an upcoming period of webinars which will look at long COVID-19 burnout in the healthcare field and strategies for effective communication with that.”

About Power of Providers Initiative | Washington State Department of Health

On August 30, 2022, Informed Choice Washington published an investigative report and analysis of the POP Initiative.

Coercion through WA State's "POP" Initiative - Informed Choice Washington | ICWA

The following from that POP Initiative story illustrates the manipulation used on Washington residents to get the COVID-19 jabs.

Greg Engler of the DOH said,

“We are calling on all licensed healthcare professionals to talk to their patients about COVID-19 vaccines. It’s one person at a time. One conversation at a time. One vaccination at a time. It’s opportunities we should not miss at the diabetes check, at the blood pressure check, at the knee repair.”

In fact, on August 26, 2022, the Washington State Medical Association (WSMA) held a webinar for healthcare providers on “Strategies To Discuss the COVID-19 Vaccine with Your Most Reluctant Patients.” Techniques discussed were as follows:

Presumptive Approach instead of the Participatory Approach: The presumptive approach is the attitude for the healthcare provider to presume the patient or parent is going to go along with getting the vaccine whereas the participatory approach is to distinctly ask whether the patient wants the vaccine. “It’s time for your flu and Covid shots, the nurse will be right in with those.”
The Bundled instead of Unbundled Approach: It’s best to suggest to the patient or parent that, besides the shots that are due, the COVID-19 shot is also available.
A “3A” approach: Ask about concerns, Acknowledge the concerns, and then Advise.
Healthcare providers should tell their patients that they, themselves, and their family members have taken the COVID-19 shots.
If patients refuse the COVID-19 shots, healthcare providers are advised not to remove them from their practice, for that runs the risk of the patients finding a practitioner who would support their vaccine-hesitant view.
The two unfounded futuristic areas. First, more COVID-19 boosters are likely forthcoming, and this shows that the COVID-19 shots are becoming part of a needed regular schedule to keep oneself healthy, so it’s best to get one now. Second, the COVID-19 shots protect people from severe illness and other things that we may not know about yet.
The importance of creating a vaccine-positive clinic culture: The best way to do this is for healthcare providers to commit to frequent COVID-19 vaccine messaging that balances the media anti-vax information. (Since when is the media anti-vax?)

Why are public health officials so eager and willing to believe that liability-free experimental injections with no long-term safety studies, are safe, effective, and necessary? So sure, in fact, they want to engage in coercive campaigns that have no scientific backing?

The taxpayer-funded war against undefined “misinformation” must come to an end. This will only occur when real civil discussion begins to happen in the public sphere, and the drug-industry capture of the entire public health and federal oversight agencies ends. We need a system of checks-and-balances in the government public health system, and an army of critical thinkers with some backbone.

What can we do? We refuse to be silenced. We all stand up and speak out. We have conversations everywhere with everyone. We learn to be comfortable with disagreement, learn to have respectful debates. Most of all, we refuse to let fear prevent us from speaking. Kindness and politeness can open minds.

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