Mary Talley Bowden on covid: what the evidence says · JRE #2335
SUBJECT: COVID
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
At the same time, they launched COVID-19 Community Corps, and this was April 1st, 2021. This was an $11.5 billion slush fund to feed out propaganda and censor people. And the day that they launched the COVID-19 Community Corps was the same day that Houston Methodist, which is where I had privileges, they mandated the COVID shots for all their employees and they were the first in the country.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
HHS did launch the COVID-19 Community Corps on April 1, 2021, and Houston Methodist was indeed the first US hospital system to require COVID-19 vaccination for its roughly 26,000 employees, announcing the policy on March 31 to April 1, 2021, so the timing and the first-in-the-nation points are roughly accurate. The Community Corps itself, however, was documented as a grassroots network of trusted community voices meant to encourage vaccination, not a fund to censor people, and CDC records tie the surrounding effort to a $3 billion vaccine-access award, not an $11.5 billion figure. A peer-reviewed benefit-cost analysis put the total cost of the related We Can Do This public education campaign plus associated vaccination costs at $8.3 billion for April 2021 to March 2022, and no authoritative source supports an $11.5 billion figure or the characterization of the program as a censorship slush fund. Overall the claim is mixed: the launch date and Houston Methodist first-mover facts hold up, but the dollar figure and the propaganda-and-censorship framing are unsupported.