You ever scroll through your feed and see some lifestyle influencer cheerfully telling everyone to get the COVID shot—for the kids, for the pregnant moms, for the breastfeeding moms—and just wonder if it felt a little too polished?
Turns out a lot of that wasn’t organic at all.
Natalie Winters dropped an exclusive thread yesterday that peels back the curtain on a massive federal effort. The CDC and HHS funneled more than $80 million into a program that paid hundreds of social-media influencers to push COVID vaccines.
They didn’t just hit the general public. They specifically went after parents of young children, pregnant women, and nursing mothers. The whole thing ran through something called El Beacon.
It was set up by a group called Public Good Projects and acted as a public-facing cutout. They recruited 496 paid influencers. The ads carried the El Beacon name and the usual #ad disclosures, but nowhere did they mention that your tax dollars were bankrolling it. Followers just saw another creator doing a “partnership.”
Winters dug through the paid-partnership labels, archived posts, and official reposts and managed to identify 57 of the people involved. The list includes fashion bloggers, family creators, a celebrity wedding planner, former TV correspondents, a ballet dancer—pretty much the usual mix of people who can reach big, targeted audiences.
One creator posted about vaccinating her six-year-old to protect a two-year-old sibling.
Another talked about getting the shot while pregnant to lower her baby’s hospital risk. There were even gift-card contests: share why you got vaccinated, follow El Beacon, maybe win a hundred or two hundred bucks.Some of the messaging was, let’s just say, not exactly precise.
One post claimed “over 678% of Americans over the age of 5 are fully vaccinated.” Another called the shots “completely safe.” All under the banner of an “anti-misinformation” campaign. But the really wild part isn’t just the payments.
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Behind El Beacon sat a real-time monitoring operation. They scooped up 247.7 million public messages, reviewed them every week for “trending or emerging misinformation,” then used those findings to rewrite the prompts they gave the influencers. Comments got watched.
Counter-messaging got supplied. The government wasn’t simply buying static ads—it was adjusting the script as the conversation unfolded, all while the average person scrolling never saw the federal hand behind the curtain.
The campaign itself claimed about a thousand posts and a potential reach of 37.2 million people. Not bad for a quiet operation.Reactions on X came fast. Sayer Ji pointed out that the $25-plus million for El Beacon sat inside a larger $156 million CDC program that ran parallel to a $911 million HHS contract—pushing the total federal persuasion spending well over a billion dollars.
Others called it heinous, a waste of money, or demanded a tax refund. One user summed it up simply: “Our own tax dollars. Messaging monitored, objections called ‘disinfo’ & countered.”
Winters put the full list of 57 names and the supporting receipts on her Substack. It’s worth reading if you want the receipts yourself.
Whether you supported the vaccines or not, the idea of the federal government quietly paying creators to shape what shows up in people’s personal feeds—and then refining those messages based on real-time public reaction—feels like a new level of public-relations warfare. And it all happened while the ads just said “El Beacon.”Makes you look at the next sponsored post a little differently.
Our government did many despicable things during C19 but this ranks very high on the list. What scum!
Blood money. The Covid 19 clot shot is the greatest crime committed against humanity in history.