A stunning victory for anti-vax social media campaigners: Why no one is scared of new COVID variants: Western governments have ruined the public’s trust in them with their attempts at narrative control. Stories in the media have been warning about the latest Covid-19 variant, the latest in a long list. It doesn’t seem like people are listening anymore.

‘This (alternative media) generation is burning the mass media to the ground. We are reclaiming our rights to world history.’  ~ JULIAN ASSANGE

In the minds of much of the public, the so-called over-hyped pandemic is firmly a thing of the past. The last thing most people want is another trip down the rabbit hole of restrictions, lockdowns, masks and vaccinations, with the past few years having seriously undermined the credibility of governments and public trust in them to do the right thing. And Western governments no longer have the political will or interest to dare make unpopular decisions, even if some are sounding the alarm.

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In Western countries the pandemic was a turning point in government-public relations precisely because it was the first outbreak of such scale to occur in the age of mass social-media culture, where people, more connected than ever before, have the unrestricted capability to voice their own opinions, to hear the opinions of others, and with these to enact dissent against governments and their policies. The social-media era has already provided many significant challenges to massive multi-billion state propaganda as it is, with Western governments scrambling to recover ‘narrative control’ over their populations that they’ve since lost.

‘The Internet is the hope of an integrated world without frontiers, a common world without controlling owners, a world of opportunities and equality. This is a utopia that we have been dreaming about and is a world in which each and every one of us are heroes of a destiny that we have in our hands.’ – Laura Chinchilla

Social media freedom has played a critical role in causing outcomes which have shocked elites, be it the election of Donald Trump in the US, or Brexit in Britain. In retaliation, Western ruling classes increased censorship and narrative policing on social media platforms by denouncing viewpoints they don’t like as ‘misinformation’ or even as malicious propaganda by foreign actors like China or Russia.

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The COVID-19 pandemic thus saw one of the most comprehensive censorship propaganda campaigns Western governments had ever undertaken (at least before the propaganda supporting Ukraine), especially when it came to those who sought to question or challenge the need for vaccines. Governments have tried to aggressively reassert narrative control, stomping out dissent against their views, broadcast by establishment media.

The manner in which the COVID-19 issue was conducted by governments has produced widespread disbelief in authority. That is not because vaccines are ‘bad’ but because people saw the profits being raked in by their Big Pharma producers, saw how aggressively governments were pushing for their execution, and were skeptical as to whether the whole thing really served the ‘public interest.’ In other words, the method (propaganda and censorship) defeated the supposed objective.

“Most sites on the Internet often have an audience that significantly exceeds the coverage of traditional media.” – United Russia MP Dmitry Vyatkin.

Big Pharma is a group of multinational drug and medicine-producing corporations which wield enough political influence and connections to be able to steer the public narrative towards endorsing their own products and which therefore exerts a monopoly over the perceived solutions to a health crisis or problem. These companies profited wholesale over the pandemic and to some extent influenced government policies on the issue. More specifically, the story was steered to argue that the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were the only ones you should use, with Chinese and Russian rivals often receiving negative or no coverage

Public disapproval of pandemic-related policies has grown because it is now more widely believed that these companies are hand-in-glove with mainstream media scaremonger to meet their commercial goals. Combined with the influence of social media, this has created large-scale distrust, despite all evidence of how harmful and deadly the early forms of COVID-19 were, especially for the sick and the elderly, and of the significant numbers of Covid-related deaths being reported to this day.

As a result, continuing to sound alarm bells about new variants and the spread of the disease does more harm than good, because it reinforces perceptions that the media are attempting to scare populations with something that is not a real threat.

The public is not interested in making sacrifices again in the name of a disease that is already perceived to have been overblown and now gone away, especially when it is believed there is an agenda behind doing so – not just Big Pharma’s but also one of power centralization, censorship and narrative-control by governments. The pandemic and the Ukraine conflict together have marked part of a shift whereby Western states have sought to reassert power lost during the social-media era, but have only achieved the opposite effect.

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