It’s easy to forget that the western media – the so-called “free press” – likes to distinguish itself from media in authoritarian regimes on the basis that, unlike them, it asks critical questions of the powerful, reports facts objectively, and formulates its analyses dispassionately.
They do propaganda, we do news – or so the western media argues.
The feverish coverage since five men were arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning close to RAF Fairford in the UK is blowing a very big hole in that claim.
Here are the known facts so far.
Three white vans, bearing the logo of a genuine fuel transit company, were spotted by a local farmer on the road outside her property as she returned from a party. Police arrived promptly and arrested the men, who were all British nationals in their twenties.
On Tuesday, it emerged that one of the arrested men actually called the police earlier – seemingly the reason officers were on the scene so quickly.
Although the men were initially arrested on explosives charges, no “viable” explosives were found. Although they were arrested on terrorism charges, which allow for 14 days of detention, they were released on bail under normal criminal laws in less than two days.
It has also emerged that the men had several empty “barrels” in their vans, plus one that contained what police described disturbingly as an “accelerant”.
Actually, that was simply a reference to petrol. The stuff that goes into vehicles to make them accelerate.
British prime minister Andy Burnham held a rare national emergency Cobra meeting over the incident.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration got involved because RAF Fairford, despite its name, is in reality a US air base from which American planes are waging an illegal war of aggression against Iran, with the UK’s blessing.
US Secretary of state Marco Rubio has said the incident “clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor”. When asked whether Iran was that actor, Trump replied: “It might be.” He added: “I know the answer… I can be very specific, but I’d rather not say.”
According to a report in the New York Times, “American and British intelligence services worked with Israel and Western countries to discover the threats against US bases, including ones in Germany.” [my emphasis]
Despite these sparse facts, the British media have uniformly rushed to a single conclusion: that this was almost certainly part of an Iranian terror plot to target the US airbase and its planes. The only room for debate allowed is whether the five men were witting or unwitting actors in that plot.
As the Guardianreported in its Wednesday edition, referring to this as a “complex investigation”: “An Iranian link to the bizarre events in the Gloucestershire countryside over the weekend is seen as increasingly likely.”
As context, let us note the following: that British and US officials have every interest in trying to hype this incident as an Iranian “terror plot”, whatever the actual evidence suggests.
Why? Because the US is waging an illegal war on Iran, and the UK is allowing it to do so from British soil. Under the rules of war, Iran has every right to attack RAF Fairford.
If the British state and billionaire-owned media were actually serving as a truly “free press”, they would be offering the context that RAF Fairford is a legitimate military target and that any attack on it by Iran would not constitute terrorism.
Of course, none have done so.
Instead, they have loyally regurgitated the British and US security services spin of a “terror plot” – based on no tangible evidence at all – that paints Britain and the US as the victims of a sinister and unwarranted act of Iranian aggression.
But context aside, an objective, sceptical media – a “free press” – would be reserving judgment on what had happened. It would be asking difficult questions. It would be offering plausible counter-narratives.
Again, none of this is happening. In the British media, there has been a lemming-like rush towards accepting uncritically the very conclusions that best serve British and US state interests.
The constant highlighting of a terrorism connection to the arrested men – for which there is no apparent evidence – is precisely the kind of coverage you would expect from state media in an authoritarian regime. This is about whipping up a public mood of fear, not about transparent fact-finding.
Notably, unlike the British media, the New York Times report does allow for another possibility, even if it instantly ignores it and then joins the British media in treating what evidence there is as proof of an Iranian terror plot.
The Timesopens with a question: “The potential ambiguities – were the men Iranian operatives, petty gas thieves, or both? – added to the confusion surrounding the arrests that the authorities have yet to fully explain.”
“Petty gas thieves”! Men in vans with empty barrels close to a farm in the middle of the night. Is it possible they could simply be criminals?!
In fact, this conjecture has been all over social media since the first reports of the men being arrested surfaced. As new details have emerged, those suspicions have only grown.
And yet Britain’s “free press” has uniformly ignored this counter-theory in favour of the US and British security services’ narrative.
Doubtless, British journalists covering this incident would call the idea that this was simply a criminal group caught in the act unhelpful “speculation”.
But how is their no-more-plausible, and possibly less plausible, theory that this was an Iranian terror plot not equally speculation – if in their case, speculation that happens to be extremely helpful to the British and US security establishments?
There are other theories we could posit too, given the known facts. Israel, which originally pushed for the illegal and disastrous war on Iran, has been looking for a way to persuade the Trump administration to return to a full-scale bombing campaign.
An attack on RAF Fairford – or the appearance of one – would be an ideal way to pile on the pressure for renewed strikes on Iran. It’s not, after all, as if there are no examples of Israel carrying out false flags.
If the “foreign actor” of Iran can recruit a gang of petty criminals to unwittingly spark a major security incident outside RAF Fairford, why can the “foreign actor” of Israel not do exactly the same?
I don’t know what happened outside the airbase. I’m not claiming to. I am keeping an open, critical mind while what facts there are emerge. If only our “free press’“ were doing the same.
There may be those reading this who find the claim that the media in our “democratic” societies is not confrontational to, or at least distant from, the state hard to believe. Such an idea may be new to them.
That should not be surprising. After all, how did each of us form our foundational view of the world – of who are the good guys, and who the bad – if not from spending a lifetime reading and watching media owned by billionaire-led corporations and the state?
Since quitting the establishment media myself a quarter of a century ago (I worked for the Guardian), I have dedicated much of my time to identifying some of the most egregious examples of skewed journalism – reporting that consistently presents events in ways that serve not their audiences’ interests but those of the powerful: the corporations themselves; western security establishments; and Israel, the linchpin of the West’s war industries.
In such cases, the establishment media readily abandons even the pretence of neutral, fair or dispassionate reporting. It serves as little more than a propaganda factory. (You can read my detailed explanation of how the Propaganda Model works here.)
This has been all too visible in the coverage of Israel’s mass-slaughter in Gaza, a genocide that could not be named as such.
It was visible in the coverage of Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine that had, in fact, been provoked by Nato for decades, as it expanded across Europe with a clear intention: either to corner Moscow militarily or drive it into a retaliatory attack on Ukraine that would provide an opportunity for the West to bleed Russia on a proxy battlefield.
It was visible in the sustained media campaign of antisemitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn, that rarest, and most dangerous, of things: a leader of a major political party who promoted socialist policies for the benefit of the public, not billionaires, and was a vehement critic of Israel long before it showed its genocidal hand.
It was visible too in the media pile-on against Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks whistleblower platform exposed British and US war crimes while also threatening to destroy the media’s top-down model. Having ridiculed him for claiming asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy for fear Washington would seek to extradite him for exposing its crimes, the media then treated his seizure by British police and incarceration for years in a high-security London prison, while the US sought his extradition for exposing its crimes, as entirely unremarkable, as barely worth reporting.
I could go on and on. There is a consistent pattern when the establishment media deals with the most important issues, the very ones in which our national security states are most invested. Then the media jettisons even the semblance of critical distance from the state.
RAF Fairford is just the latest example of how, in such important moments, the media serves as nothing more than the security state’s loudspeaker.
The War in Ukraine has not been entirely protest-free from Kiev’s side of things. During the summer of 2026 a ‘sudden’ wave of ‘cardboard protests’ were brought to the public’s eye demanding the resignation of Zelensky. These demonstrations occurred as a reaction to the removal Defense Minister Fedorov from his position, or at least that was the overtly stated motivation for them. Of course, as we know, official reasons for protests always sound ‘nice’ but how many people living in a country at war actually know or care about the hirings and firings of ministers? Perhaps this weak motivating factor, saving some minister in a government viewed from all sides as completely corrupt, is why those cardboard signs and their messages didn’t take hold. The protestors then declared that their mission had ‘no end date’ attached to it, but as we can see Zelensky remains in office, and cardboard signage seems to have gone out of fashion.
But this time, at least on its surface, it seems as though it is the army itself which is the offended party that wants to protest. Some sort of slogan like ‘Zelensky betrayed the army’ will be much more enticing to protestors, than “let’s save Minister X for being fired”. Also, when given the choice between ‘the army or Zelensky’ I think we all know who would lose across a wide range of diverse public opinion in 2026 Ukraine.
Somehow, despite all the evidence shown through human history, many are sure that holding up signs will change everything radically, and those with this mentality need their slogans to be broad and emotional. According to Gazeta.Ru the situation with the upcoming October 3rd anti-Zelensky protests will look something like this:
“Ukrainian military officer Alexander Todorov on the MayiakUA YouTube channel announced a series of rallies demanding the resignation of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his team.”
According to him, the public actions are scheduled for October 3rd, 2026. They want to hold rallies in Kiev near the presidential administration building, as well as in other cities of Ukraine. Todorov called on the Ukrainian diasporas to support the initiative abroad.
The military man criticized the current leadership. In his opinion, the soldiers feel abandoned, and the government is engaged in corruption and misuse of foreign aid. Todorov is also concerned about plans for the possible mobilization of women and citizens from the age of 18.
On the eve of the Verkhovna Rada deputy Artem Dmytruk said that the Security Service of Ukraine had detained Todorov. The politician did not provide details. There have been no official comments on the incident yet.”
The biggest thing that stands out is that Todorov wants these protests to go international via the Ukrainian diaspora, meaning the same shows of support on EU streets for Zelensky, may start to portray him as a more ‘realistic figure’ to put it mildly. And now that millions of Ukrainian citizens have fled their native land, there are plenty of them to use as protestors in the West.
It is also important to note that Todorov is on the same “Peace Keeper” list as anyone who has said or done anything even mildly pro-Russian since 2014. This website is at the very least an informal “enemies list” for post-Maidan Ukraine that provides personal information, on all those who stand against the revolution. The Russian side often portrays this to be a “kill list” and that it was actually created in or by the West. According to Izvestia the site works as such:
Myrotvorets (Peacekeeper) positions itself as a database with information about those people whom the owners of the resource consider to be involved in crimes against the security of Ukraine. The website is officially registered in Canada, and in Ukraine it has the status of an independent non-governmental media outlet.
The new status of Todorov as being a possible foreign enemy agent means that he certainly does not have nearly unilateral support from the elite and that some people responsible for the status quo are very much against this. Also, it means that this Ukrainian Army soldier could be arrested or called in for questioning at any time even before the protests start. We should also keep in mind that supposedly Todorov was the organizer of the following political demonstrations, some occurring even before the Maidan:
2011 — Against Petro Yushchenko
2012 — Against local authorities and power engineers (electric companies)
2014 — Against radicals and Kolomoisky
2017— Against Poroshenko
2024 — Against the military leadership and the TCC (press gangs)
As you can see none of the protests above achieved anything, but none of them happened under the conditions of 2026 after Putin ‘took the gloves off’ during the summer. The Russian side has hit infrastructure hard and how much of Ukraine’s economy remains is open for debate, but the situation is fairly dire. The Kiev Regime is not just plodding along under the usual corruption + apathy + conscription + foreign financing that it has been since 2022. Everything is being hit, everything is being destroyed and it looks like military resistance is crumbling, thus this time, in terms of protests, ‘things could be different’. But the big question remains, who could be the one(s) standing behind Todorov? Who would benefit from yet another revolution in Ukraine?
Who is behind these upcoming protests?
If the objective were to just send the last local schmuck into the meat grinder and truly fight to the last Ukrainian to make Putin pay dearly for every square meter of territory, then there would be no need to change out Zelensky. Furthermore, after so many officials around Zelensky have fled, quit, or otherwise left the game, it looks like the tower of power is very wobbly, meaning that any violent mass protest would essentially bring the house of cards crashing down. Thus, we can be fairly confident that anyone who would want to fund a protest wants to end the war.
A near total political collapse, with ‘the enemy at the gates’ will surely cause the entire system to spiral out of control and disintegrate, meaning that there would not be enough cohesion for the war to continue. Russians often joke that all that is needed for a declaration of total capitulation would be a cat’s paw print, the signature of a legitimate president is only needed for some other more ‘two-sided’ peace deal, that is to say if capitulation is on the table, Lil’ Zel isn’t needed to sign it.
And, although he is made fun of for his comedy background and drug addiction, Zelensky has been the superficial glue keeping the whole show together. He, in a strange way, is sort of the last bastion of ‘Project Ukraine’ as the Russians call it, as he absolutely will not abdicate the toxic throne. So the game looks to be this; that the Green Goblin must be ousted to end the war in the fall/winter of 2026… for some unstated reason by some unknown parties. But who could they be?
George Soros, is yet again at the center of the Russian rumor mill, but it is hard to exactly say why he would be behind this maneuver. Perhaps, I have been completely wrong in previous pieces, and indeed the Europeans do need time to prep for a war in the 2030s and thus this failed attempt to break the Russian bear needs to end immediately? Is it that they need time to get ready for the next offensive and Kiev has become a drain rather than a boon? I am not sure if this is true, and perhaps, there is a ‘boy who cried wolf’ effect happening on alternative media, that are just used to blaming Soros for protests. If it’s a march with signs and slogans calling for regime change, it’s got to be Soros right?
Team Trump or some forces in the USA, could be vying to get this damn thing over with. Just because publically and on camera Donald Trump seems to personally despise Zelensky doesn’t mean anything, but Trump has been talking about better relations with Russia since his very first political campaign. Also and more importantly, the source of all big lobbyist bribes, Israel, is in deep trouble. Essentially, the Iran-Israel issue is way more important and stealing the show, and Trump has never had much political will to antagonize Russia. When D.C. faces the choice between saving the Zionist Paradise or Neo-Khazaria you know which front they are going to invest in.
There are also definitely large factions with cash in America, that despite being ‘in a distant second place’ politically, want antagonism of Russia to be a thing of the past. If you haven’t noticed, extremely prominent media voices in America can now regularly have Russian politicians and thinkers on their programs, something that would have been absolutely a career death sentence, and maybe even ‘punishable’, just a few years ago. This American ‘third position’, with ‘second place’ influence, does not want nuclear conflict, and wants to move on from the Cold War and games of global domination.
The visit of Ratcliffe to Moscow, may signal that even the most passionate Russophobes in Washington want to call this one done, and move on.
European 4D chess masters, could, after having acknowledged that the Battle for Ukraine is over, choose to allow Russia to make the broadest possible front across a new awkward border in Ukraine, or even better, allow the 21st Century’s Golden Horde to actually have a new physical border with places like Poland and Romania to spark a fresh wave of Russophobic paranoia in local politics. This sounds like absolutely insane reasoning, to let Russia be closer to a place like Poland in order to spark more Russophobia by proximity, but if you haven’t noticed, the leadership of the European continent looks like the tea party from Alice in Wonderland. We cannot and should not completely exclude concepts that are insane, especially if they are very ‘media friendly’ and involve ‘message sending’. Over-and-over again, Kiev has been forced to launch attacks for PR purposes at the cost of thousands of men, the reasoning in Brussels based on creating optics to somehow achieve tangible results. Like it or not this is how they do things. So why not let the Russians get closer, as to make them more of a threat to attack them in 2035? This is fantastic PR optics, look at how they ‘expanded their empire into Europe and Poland is next!’.
Also, the weak point by which Russia has been invaded from Europe has been the broad steppes of Ukraine. The Nazis did go through Finland, got near Murmansk and sat there for the whole war, the border with Finland, despite being quite big, just isn’t geographically good enough, but lots of massive flat space is quite hard to defend. Furthermore, that land is now nearly completely destroyed and will require unfathomable amounts of rubles to rebuild, and while the Russians are rebuilding they will be vulnerable.
What if the protests succeed?
We have already seen some internal fighting between factions within Kiev and this would only intensify as protestors started to storm the theoretical location where the Cocaine King rules from. Many young men may already be convinced that taking risks protesting is a far better option than dying with absolute certainty on the front after conscription. Thus, the time might be ‘right’ for this sort of thing, and with another Maidan occurring, and enemy forces so close, this would surely fracture things quickly. If the protests are not put down properly the oligarchs, clans, and other wealthy individuals will swiftly look to save their skins and livelihoods potentially breaking up the country or just signing whatever Moscow wants them to. Once the military were to lose command cohesion, there won’t be any more coordinated drone strikes to hold the ‘orcs’ at bay. Ironically, the Maidan which gave birth to the Kiev Regime could be the same mechanism that leads to its downfall after utterly destroying the Ukrainian nation, but as the cliché goes ‘time will tell’.
When the establishment media deals with issues in which the West’s war industries are most heavily invested, it happily jettisons even the semblance of critical distance from the state
It’s easy to forget that the western media – the so-called “free press” – likes to distinguish itself from media in authoritarian regimes on the basis that, unlike them, it asks critical questions of the powerful, reports facts objectively, and formulates its analyses dispassionately.
They do propaganda, we do news – or so the western media argues.
The feverish coverage since five men were arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning close to RAF Fairford in the UK is blowing a very big hole in that claim.
Here are the known facts so far.
Three white vans, bearing the logo of a genuine fuel transit company, were spotted by a local farmer on the road outside her property as she returned from a party. Police arrived promptly and arrested the men, who were all British nationals in their twenties.
On Tuesday, it emerged that one of the arrested men actually called the police earlier – seemingly the reason officers were on the scene so quickly.
Although the men were initially arrested on explosives charges, no “viable” explosives were found. Although they were arrested on terrorism charges, which allow for 14 days of detention, they were released on bail under normal criminal laws in less than two days.
It has also emerged that the men had several empty “barrels” in their vans, plus one that contained what police described disturbingly as an “accelerant”.
Actually, that was simply a reference to petrol. The stuff that goes into vehicles to make them accelerate.
British prime minister Andy Burnham held a rare national emergency Cobra meeting over the incident.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration got involved because RAF Fairford, despite its name, is in reality a US air base from which American planes are waging an illegal war of aggression against Iran, with the UK’s blessing.
US Secretary of state Marco Rubio has said the incident “clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor”. When asked whether Iran was that actor, Trump replied: “It might be.” He added: “I know the answer… I can be very specific, but I’d rather not say.”
According to a report in the New York Times, “American and British intelligence services worked with Israel and Western countries to discover the threats against US bases, including ones in Germany.” [my emphasis]
Despite these sparse facts, the British media have uniformly rushed to a single conclusion: that this was almost certainly part of an Iranian terror plot to target the US airbase and its planes. The only room for debate allowed is whether the five men were witting or unwitting actors in that plot.
As the Guardian reported in its Wednesday edition, referring to this as a “complex investigation”: “An Iranian link to the bizarre events in the Gloucestershire countryside over the weekend is seen as increasingly likely.”
As context, let us note the following: that British and US officials have every interest in trying to hype this incident as an Iranian “terror plot”, whatever the actual evidence suggests.
Why? Because the US is waging an illegal war on Iran, and the UK is allowing it to do so from British soil. Under the rules of war, Iran has every right to attack RAF Fairford.
If the British state and billionaire-owned media were actually serving as a truly “free press”, they would be offering the context that RAF Fairford is a legitimate military target and that any attack on it by Iran would not constitute terrorism.
Of course, none have done so.
Instead, they have loyally regurgitated the British and US security services spin of a “terror plot” – based on no tangible evidence at all – that paints Britain and the US as the victims of a sinister and unwarranted act of Iranian aggression.
But context aside, an objective, sceptical media – a “free press” – would be reserving judgment on what had happened. It would be asking difficult questions. It would be offering plausible counter-narratives.
Again, none of this is happening. In the British media, there has been a lemming-like rush towards accepting uncritically the very conclusions that best serve British and US state interests.
The constant highlighting of a terrorism connection to the arrested men – for which there is no apparent evidence – is precisely the kind of coverage you would expect from state media in an authoritarian regime. This is about whipping up a public mood of fear, not about transparent fact-finding.
Notably, unlike the British media, the New York Times report does allow for another possibility, even if it instantly ignores it and then joins the British media in treating what evidence there is as proof of an Iranian terror plot.
The Times opens with a question: “The potential ambiguities – were the men Iranian operatives, petty gas thieves, or both? – added to the confusion surrounding the arrests that the authorities have yet to fully explain.”
“Petty gas thieves”! Men in vans with empty barrels close to a farm in the middle of the night. Is it possible they could simply be criminals?!
In fact, this conjecture has been all over social media since the first reports of the men being arrested surfaced. As new details have emerged, those suspicions have only grown.
And yet Britain’s “free press” has uniformly ignored this counter-theory in favour of the US and British security services’ narrative.
Doubtless, British journalists covering this incident would call the idea that this was simply a criminal group caught in the act unhelpful “speculation”.
But how is their no-more-plausible, and possibly less plausible, theory that this was an Iranian terror plot not equally speculation – if in their case, speculation that happens to be extremely helpful to the British and US security establishments?
There are other theories we could posit too, given the known facts. Israel, which originally pushed for the illegal and disastrous war on Iran, has been looking for a way to persuade the Trump administration to return to a full-scale bombing campaign.
An attack on RAF Fairford – or the appearance of one – would be an ideal way to pile on the pressure for renewed strikes on Iran. It’s not, after all, as if there are no examples of Israel carrying out false flags.
If the “foreign actor” of Iran can recruit a gang of petty criminals to unwittingly spark a major security incident outside RAF Fairford, why can the “foreign actor” of Israel not do exactly the same?
I don’t know what happened outside the airbase. I’m not claiming to. I am keeping an open, critical mind while what facts there are emerge. If only our “free press’“ were doing the same.
There may be those reading this who find the claim that the media in our “democratic” societies is not confrontational to, or at least distant from, the state hard to believe. Such an idea may be new to them.
That should not be surprising. After all, how did each of us form our foundational view of the world – of who are the good guys, and who the bad – if not from spending a lifetime reading and watching media owned by billionaire-led corporations and the state?
Since quitting the establishment media myself a quarter of a century ago (I worked for the Guardian), I have dedicated much of my time to identifying some of the most egregious examples of skewed journalism – reporting that consistently presents events in ways that serve not their audiences’ interests but those of the powerful: the corporations themselves; western security establishments; and Israel, the linchpin of the West’s war industries.
In such cases, the establishment media readily abandons even the pretence of neutral, fair or dispassionate reporting. It serves as little more than a propaganda factory. (You can read my detailed explanation of how the Propaganda Model works here.)
This has been all too visible in the coverage of Israel’s mass-slaughter in Gaza, a genocide that could not be named as such.
It was visible in the coverage of Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine that had, in fact, been provoked by Nato for decades, as it expanded across Europe with a clear intention: either to corner Moscow militarily or drive it into a retaliatory attack on Ukraine that would provide an opportunity for the West to bleed Russia on a proxy battlefield.
It was visible in the sustained media campaign of antisemitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn, that rarest, and most dangerous, of things: a leader of a major political party who promoted socialist policies for the benefit of the public, not billionaires, and was a vehement critic of Israel long before it showed its genocidal hand.
It was visible too in the media pile-on against Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks whistleblower platform exposed British and US war crimes while also threatening to destroy the media’s top-down model. Having ridiculed him for claiming asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy for fear Washington would seek to extradite him for exposing its crimes, the media then treated his seizure by British police and incarceration for years in a high-security London prison, while the US sought his extradition for exposing its crimes, as entirely unremarkable, as barely worth reporting.
I could go on and on. There is a consistent pattern when the establishment media deals with the most important issues, the very ones in which our national security states are most invested. Then the media jettisons even the semblance of critical distance from the state.
RAF Fairford is just the latest example of how, in such important moments, the media serves as nothing more than the security state’s loudspeaker.
El 26 de agosto de 1346 se disputó una de las batallas más importantes de la Guerra de los Cien Años, la de Crécy, en la que el ejército inglés de Eduardo III derrotó al francés de Felipe VI de forma tan contundente que permitió al primero sitiar Calais y determinar el sino de la […]
How a $240 million messaging machine put a three-year-old puppet to work selling an mRNA shot to parents of infants — and what the government has quietly admitted since.
It’s a well-made piece of persuasion. Elmo, who has been three and a half years old since 1984, shows off his “super duper” bandage. There “was a little pinch. But it was okay.” Then his father, Louie, looks into the camera and speaks to every hesitant parent in America:
“I had a lot of questions about Elmo getting the COVID vaccine. Was it safe? Was it the right decision?”
Eleven seconds later, the doubt has been resolved for you:
“I learned that Elmo getting vaccinated is the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy and enjoying the things they love.”
A hug follows. Then an announcer: “It’s okay to have questions about COVID vaccines for your kids.”
That’s the move worth studying. The ad takes the parent’s instinct to ask questions, gives it to a beloved puppet, and answers it before the parent has a chance to. It presents doubt so it can close it down.
This was not a whimsical one-off from a children’s television workshop. It was one output of what its own organizers called the largest communications program in our nation’s history, built with federal public-health agencies, a major medical trade association, and tens of millions of corporate dollars.
Four years later, Pfizer-BioNTech’s product is no longer authorized for children ages six months through four years. Federal guidance and product labeling have also narrowed which pediatric uses are on-label, a shift sharply at odds with the PSA’s broad, categorical reassurance. Nobody made a puppet video about that.
This is the story of who built the campaign, what it cost, and what came after.
Five institutions. Each one deserves a name and a face.
Sesame Workshop
The nonprofit behind Sesame Street produced and released the spot. Its campaign lead was Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, Senior Vice President of US Social Impact. Its president at the time, Sherrie Westin, was named CEO in July 2024.
The clearest statement of what Sesame thought it was offering came from its own chief marketing officer. Launching an earlier round of vaccine PSAs, Samantha Maltin, EVP and CMO, said the goal was to:
“… harness the power of Sesame Workshop and the reach of the Ad Council…”
Harness the power. The asset being put to use was fifty years of trust that parents and children have placed in these characters.
The Ad Council
The Ad Council turns corporate media budgets into “public service” messaging. Its president and CEO, Lisa Sherman, was the campaign’s public face. On the Elmo spot:
“It’s important that parents feel informed and confident about what the COVID-19 vaccines mean for their families, and we are proud to work with our partners, medical experts – and of course Elmo – to spread that message.”
She also named the urgency: this was “an important decision many need to make in advance of the upcoming school season.”
COVID Collaborative
The COVID Collaborative is a bipartisan assembly of former officials, and it convened the vaccine education initiative with the Ad Council. Its CEO is John Bridgeland, former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Its president is Gary Edson, and its co-chairs are former Idaho Gov. and Sen. Dirk Kempthorne (R) and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D). The Collaborative is a project of UNITE, chaired by Tim Shriver.
The AAP, the pediatricians’ professional association, was the other named production partner. Its president in 2022 was Dr. Moira Szilagyi. Looking back later, she said: “Somewhere what got lost in our country, I think, was what a miracle these vaccines were.”
Keep the AAP in mind. It comes back in Part IV.
Part II: Follow the Money
The Elmo spot was built on a large funding structure, and its size helps explain how thoroughly this message saturated American media.
The corporate fund. On November 23, 2020, before any vaccine was authorized, the Ad Council announced a $50 million fund for the COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative, created with the COVID Collaborative. By February 2021 it had exceeded that goal.
The COVID Collaborative reports more than $52 million raised. The leading contributors it names are Amazon, Apple, Bank of America, Cisco, CVS Health, Facebook, General Motors, Google and YouTube, the Humana Foundation, NBCUniversal/Comcast, Salesforce, Verizon, Walgreens, and Walmart.
Two of those names stand out. CVS Health and Walgreens both gave the shots the campaign was promoting in their own pharmacies.
The donated media. The money was only the seed. By October 26, 2021, the initiative had surpassed its goal of $240 million in donated media and related publicity. Donors of airtime and ad inventory included Disney (ABC, ESPN, Hulu), FOX, NBCUniversal and Telemundo, ViacomCBS, WarnerMedia, Facebook and Instagram, Google and YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and The Weather Channel.
The taxpayer layer. Alongside the private effort, HHS ran its own $265 million COVID public-education campaign starting in summer 2020. That included a $250 million NIH award to the Fors Marsh Group, which created the “We Can Do This” brand, all paid for through a $300 million interagency agreement drawing on CDC’s CARES Act funds. Under its “Vaccinate with Confidence” framework, the CDC funded more than 200 partners. Across the March 2021–December 2022 rollout, it funded 110 primary and 1,051 subrecipient partners at the national, state, and community level.
A note on accuracy. I have not found documentation that Pfizer or Moderna directly paid for the Elmo spot, and the campaign materials don’t list them as partners. Pfizer does appear as a Sesame Workshop donor in later years, in the $100,000–$249,999 band of its 2024 impact report. That’s worth knowing, but it’s a separate fact. The documented structure is damning on its own: corporate money, federal science guidance, and a medical trade association, all speaking through a puppet.
Part III: It Wasn’t One Ad
The Elmo spot was the youngest-audience edge of a sustained effort to put Sesame Street characters to work for vaccine messaging.
June 2022: Elmo’s PSA, released days after the FDA’s emergency authorization for children as young as six months.
Later: Sesame Workshop, the Ad Council, COVID Collaborative, and CDC launched a further series of PSAs with Elmo, Louie and other Muppets, “created in close partnership with the CDC.”
“When it starts getting into complex territory that involves the power of the state, the influence of pharmaceutical companies, the impact of coronavirus on young children — these are not issues I want resolved by members of Elmo’s family.”
The critics were dismissed as cranks at the time. Here is what the government has said since.
Part IV: The Walk-Back Nobody Advertised
There was no $240 million campaign for any of what follows. No Muppets and no hug at the end. It came out as label changes, regulatory memos, and footnotes in clinical guidance.
The cardiac warning got stronger
On June 25, 2025, the FDA required and approved expanded warnings about myocarditis and pericarditis on Pfizer’s Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax. The new label estimates about 8 cases per million doses in people aged 6 months through 64 years, and about 27 per million in males aged 12 through 24, in the week after vaccination.
The most important sentence isn’t about frequency, though. It’s about what happened to the hearts afterward:
“… at a median follow-up of approximately 5 months post-vaccination, persistence of abnormal cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) findings that are a marker for myocardial injury was common. The clinical and prognostic significance of these CMR findings is not known.”
Read it twice. Five months out, markers of heart-muscle injury were “common,” and the agency says their long-term significance is “not known.” This isn’t a critic’s claim. It comes from an FDA-funded, FDA-co-authored study, and it’s now printed on the label.
The spot told parents “there was a little pinch. But it was okay.” Nobody in the ad said “unknown long-term cardiac significance.”
The authorization for the youngest children was pulled
That is the age group the Elmo spot was released to reach. It went out days after emergency authorization opened the shots to children as young as six months. Four years later, one of the two products it promoted to parents of those children can’t legally be given to them.
Healthy children are now “off-label”
The broad “everyone six months and older” recommendation is gone. In May 2025, HHS dropped the routine recommendation for healthy children, and the CDC moved to what it calls shared clinical decision-making.
CDC’s current guidance, updated September 23, 2026, limits Moderna’s approval for the youngest children to those with “at least one condition that places them at increased risk for severe COVID-19.” Then it states the conclusion outright:
“Vaccination of children 5-11 years of age with any product other than Spikevax or Comirnaty and vaccination of children in this age group without high-risk conditions is off-label use.”
“Vaccination of persons 12-64 years of age without high-risk conditions is off-label use.”
In 2022, the message was that vaccinating Elmo was “the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy.” In 2026, the CDC’s own wording is that giving the shot to a healthy child is off-label.
The deaths question
On November 28, 2025, Dr. Vinay Prasad, then director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, sent staff a memo headed “Deaths in children due to COVID-19 vaccines and CBER’s path forward.” He wrote that career staff “have found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” based on an initial review of 96 child deaths reported to VAERS between 2021 and 2024.
The FDA’s formal analysis, made public in May 2026, came back more cautious. Of the 96 reports reviewed, none were classified as “certain.” Five were classified “possible” and two “probable,” mostly involving myocarditis, with an average age of 13. The agency stressed that these classifications don’t prove causation.
Media coverage framed that result as a debunking. Set the headline aside, though. The FDA’s own conservative review, using WHO causality criteria, still found seven child deaths it could not rule out as vaccine-related, and it called two of them probable.
And yet, still being promoted
This is where the irony stops being subtle.
Visit the FDA’s parent-facing page today, Vaccines for Children – A Guide for Parents and Caregivers. The COVID-19 vaccine is still listed alongside measles and polio among “the most commonly administered vaccines.” And parents are still told:
“Getting a COVID-19 vaccine is the best way to prevent COVID-19, including the potential consequences of hospitalization and death.”
That’s Louie’s line almost word for word, four years later, from the same agency whose label now carries the cardiac warning, whose authorization for under-5s was pulled, and whose own reviewers flagged seven child deaths.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, a production partner on the Elmo spot, hasn’t backed off either. As of September 2026, the AAP recommends COVID-19 vaccination for “all infants and children ages 6 months through 23 months,” and for “anyone ages 2 to 18 who isn’t at risk but whose parents or guardian wants them to get a shot.”
So we have two different postures at once. The regulator has narrowed approval, expanded the warning, and reclassified healthy-child use as off-label. The professional association that helped make the puppet ad still recommends the shot for every baby. And the FDA’s own parent guide still uses the 2022 talking points.
Part V: What They’ll Say — and Why It Doesn’t Save Them
Serious readers deserve the strongest counterargument, so here it is.
That’s a legitimate data point and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t answer the question this piece is asking, for three reasons.
First, the comparison is an average over a population of teenagers and young adults. It says nothing about a healthy toddler with near-zero risk of severe disease. That’s the child this campaign targeted, and the child for whom the CDC now calls the shot off-label.
Second, it doesn’t address the finding printed on the label: persistent markers of heart-muscle injury at five months, of “not known” significance. The open letter discussed below says there are “no studies demonstrating prevention of hospitalization or death” in children. If that’s right, an unknown cardiac risk is being weighed against a benefit that was never shown.
Third, and most importantly, the argument here doesn’t depend on any contested injury number. It depends on an asymmetry. When the product was being promoted, it got a puppet, $50 million, a quarter-billion in donated airtime, the CDC’s logo, and the pediatricians’ endorsement. When the regulator narrowed the product, it got a label revision and a footnote. The public was sold a certainty the evidence never supported, and was never told when that certainty was withdrawn.
That isn’t public health communication. It’s a marketing campaign that never issued a correction.
Part VI: The Petition — Why I Signed
Earlier this month, 168 physicians, scientists, researchers, lawmakers, and health-freedom advocates, representing more than 63 million followers, sent an open letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump demanding removal of the mRNA platform. The effort was coordinated by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden. The signatories include Rep. Thomas Massie, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louisiana Deputy Surgeon General Dr. Sean Troxclair, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Tucker Carlson, and others.
I’m one of them, and I want to explain why.
The letter’s first demand is to “ban mRNA/gene therapy-derived technologies for all vaccines.” That includes the products still being given to children. Its other demands are to end the PREP Act declaration and its “ironclad liability shield for manufacturers and administrators,” ask Congress to repeal the PREP Act, ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, end the incentive structures that push providers toward medical coercion, and end conflicts of interest at the CDC, FDA, NIH, and NIAID.
On children specifically, the letter makes the point this whole piece has been building toward:
“Parental choice is not realistic when parents are not getting informed consent on the true risks of these products.”
It also takes on the “shared clinical decision-making” framework directly:
“By treating the decision to inject a child with mRNA as a ‘shared decision,’ while treating routine injections as the default, a dangerous legal precedent is being set that assigns powers to the federal government that have historically belonged solely to parents.”
According to the letter, more than 50 million Americans received mRNA COVID shots this year, including about 7 million children, and HHS has awarded $1.24 billion in contracts to Pfizer for future mRNA shots, “including for children.”
The Elmo spot is exactly why that line about informed consent matters. You can’t give informed consent to a hug from a puppet. A one-minute ad that turns a parent’s hesitation into a script and then answers it in eleven seconds isn’t informing anyone. It’s persuasion aimed at the people least able to push back: parents who trust Sesame Street and children who love Elmo.
HHS’s response to the open letter, through press secretary Emily Hilliard, was that Secretary Kennedy “believes mRNA products warrant heightened scientific scrutiny,” and that HHS had “wound down investments in mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory viruses because the technology does not effectively protect against infection from rapidly mutating viruses such as COVID-19 and flu.”
Think about that sentence next to the Elmo spot. The federal health department now says the technology “does not effectively protect against infection” from COVID. In 2022, a puppet told America it was “the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy.”
Heightened scrutiny isn’t enough. A product that federal officials now concede doesn’t reliably prevent infection, that carries a cardiac warning with unknown long-term significance, whose own regulator calls it off-label for healthy children, and whose makers are protected from liability should not be given to children at all.
Conclusion: The Correction That Never Aired
Every institution in the Elmo spot is still operating. Sesame Workshop is still making children’s programming. The Ad Council is still running “public service” campaigns. The CDC’s logo is still on its creative. The AAP still recommends the shot for every infant. The FDA’s parent guide still repeats Louie’s line.
None of them has produced a PSA that says: We told you this was the best way to protect your baby. Since then the label has been changed to warn about heart injury. The authorization for the youngest children was withdrawn. The government now calls this use off-label for healthy kids. We’re sorry we used Elmo to tell you otherwise.
That’s the one-minute spot this country is owed. Until it airs, the original belongs where I’ve put it: in the Hall of Fame of the Covid-era Mockingbird Media, as a case study in what happens when institutions that are supposed to earn a parent’s trust decide to manufacture it instead.
Watch it again. Listen for the moment Louie asks, “Was it safe?”
It was a good question. It still is. They just never let him wait for the answer.
From the Covid-era Mockingbird Media Hall of Fame: Targeting Kids with Covid Jabs using Sesame Street Characters
June 2022. Elmo, “age 3½,” shows off his bandage. His dad Louie tells parents of kids as young as six months: “I had a lot of questions… Was it safe? Was it the… pic.twitter.com/rbEbCdEno2
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