F(o)l(l)ow the pandemic money
How the academic and professional classes are being captured with respect to vaccine confidence, social-media audience intel, and long Covid
“Follow the money” has been one approach to analyze “COVID Science” and the pandemic response, and explain their major blunders — see e.g. “Putting Big Bad Pharma Back on Trial in the COVID-19 Era“ or, at a broader political level, “In Canada, follow the money + the ideas”. I have not looked much into this theme, but I did just write about a $2.2m federal research grant program to promote “vaccine confidence” (see last part of that post), which is clearly manipulating the direction of scholarly research in Canada. Now, my own social-media “research” on Telegram brought up an other pertinent find: The federal government is procuring $339.000 for “Vaccination Confidence in Canada: Online Conversation and Audience Analysis”. On the same CanadaBuys web site, another $720,000 are up for grabs for “Post COVID-19 Condition- Evidence Syntheses and Consultation Services”.
The first tender is summarized as follows:
In preparation for increased vaccination education, promotion, and outreach, The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) is requiring the services of a consultant to analyze the vaccine related conversations on social media and PHAC social media initiative and campaign performance.
The consultant will analyze vaccine-related conversations, and their participants, on Twitter and and social media channels, including Reddit, Blogs, Forums, and News, spanning up to three years of historical data.
The consultant will analyze PHAC’s social media initiative and campaign performance, including content engagements and the campaign’s influence on vaccine-related conversation.
The statement of work (sow.pdf document under “Bidding details”) outlines many details of this short-term project. For example, under “conversation and audience analysis”, the consultant is expected to perform “social listening” and “audience network mapping and analysis”. In addition, the agency is looking for an analysis of its most recent fall booster campaign. Among the “social listening” methods, the consultant will create a “syntax for vaccine hesitancy pillars”. While this analysis is planned as a retrospective (historical) review up to three year into past social media conversations, the step to ongoing, real-time monitoring and developing artificial-intelligence based intervention tools is a small one and greatly concerning.
Equally disconcerting is the State’s interest in the people participating in online discussions: “Sub-communities are segmented based on interconnections (follower relationships) and then profiled based on their common affinities, demographics, and behaviors.” While this analysis is cushioned in terms of how to “reach” vaccine-hesitant groups, the next step is again in full view: interventions against well-connected, influential individuals, as seen most recently in the “Twitter files”.
Lastly, PHAC has already selected the contractor. The Advance Contract Award Notice (acan.pdf) document indicates that PULSAR Platform from London, UK, is the lucky winner of $339,000 in Canadian taxpayer funds for this contract. The reason given for using a pre-identified contractor is “6.d. Only one person or firm is capable of performing the contract”, and I wonder what Canadian social-media researchers and the Canadian data analytics industry might have to say about this. The procurement rules would prevent awarding this contract if another supplier submitted a “Statement of Capabilities that meets the minimum requirements identified” in the notice. Of course, those minimum requirements are written in a way that they match PULSAR’s experience, tools, and data/media access.
Pulsar is an audience intelligence company. We help organizations understand their audiences and create messages that matter to them, by combining conversational and behavioral data from the world’s leading digital sources, with vertical AI, and smart human minds.
One IT company defines “vertical AI” as “a revolutionary concept where machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are leading the processes of data collection, aggregation, sanitation, and most importantly: decision making.” As decision-making is included here, this development must be considered as dystopian and alarming, if left unchecked.
The public health case study of the PULSAR platform comes with a quote that illustrates the irrational detachment of the public health establishment from the realities on the ground and the concerns of real people: “These hashtags were infecting the UK like a hashtag virus. It’s really insightful to see the connections between these hashtags, what’s being spoken about and what’s being shared in those tweets.“ Yes, “these hashtags” (compare to Trudeau’s “those people”) seems to refer to #vaccine, #science, #covid19, and more shockingly (to the bureaucrats), #1stdonoharm, #bigpharma, #informedconsent, #novaccinepassports, and "#nurembergcode. Embarrassingly, the case study might be based in Canada, as indicated by the Ontario politics hashtag #onpoli.
As noted above, another open tender on the CanadaBuys site caught my attention. It is titled “Post COVID-19 Condition- Evidence Syntheses and Consultation Services” and described as follows:
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) requires the professional services of an experienced research team to conduct evidence syntheses to help build the body of evidence on post COVID-19 condition, through the development of multiple reviews (systematic, rapid, scoping, etc.) and provide routine evidence summaries on various topics related to post COVID-19 condition.
You would be forgiven if you missed the core term in the above sentence: “post COVID-19 condition”, more commonly termed “long Covid”. I haven’t written about long Covid yet, as far as I recall (but I may have forgotten due to some memory loss after a possible Covid infection in September…). Although there are indications that this is not a complete non-issue (see e.g. the trusted Swiss Policy Research’s “Post-Acute Covid and Long Covid” summary), I can’t bring myself to take long Covid seriously. I find humour a suitable approach to the topic, and the Brownstone Institute’s “The Long Arm of the Covid Saga” is a helpful example:
With the emergency phase of the pandemic behind us, the Covid alarmists don’t have much material left to work with—but doomsaying abhors a vacuum.
Enter long Covid, the perfect object of fear because it can never be disproved. You can hold it responsible for any symptom you develop after the acute phase of the illness, whether weeks or years down the road. Tired? Long Covid. Forgot where you put your keys? Long Covid. Breathless after climbing a flight of stairs? Long Covid, no doubt. It’s an unfalsifiable diagnosis, a fearmonger’s wet dream.
So, according to the rfp.pdf document for the tender, Canada is now investing up to $720,000 (excluding taxes) for the “professional services of an experienced research team” to “provide routine (i.e., biweekly to monthly) evidence summaires [sic] on various topics related to post COVID-19 condition”; “conduct evidence syntheses to help build the body of evidence on post COVID-19 condition, through the development of multiple reviews (systematic, rapid, scoping, etc.)”; and “provide training and consultation services on methodologies in evidence synthesis”.
Having completed a couple of consulting contracts for a local government agency, I am somewhat familiar with the procurement system for professional services. One of my contracts was “sole-sourced” due to my unique expertise with the subject, so I am not surprised to see the PULSAR contract above. In the second tender, I don’t find much to critique and sincerely hope that a competent, unbiased research team will win the bidding. Maybe, researchers from “team reality”, the heterodox scientists and doctors who were censored and silenced during the last three years, could come together to submit a proposal.
What the second tender shows, first and foremost, is one of the mechanisms that keeps the professional and academic classes captured on a dominant narrative. By issuing the tender, PHAC has predetermined that this issue will be on the medium-term agenda of public health in Canada. The group receiving this contract would be foolish to “find” that there is no “post Covid condition” or that it is not an important public health issue. Instead, a team will be selected that has core expertise, and therefore direct or indirect financial interest, in long Covid or more broadly, in chronic respiratory/viral illness. A tender like “Post COVID-19 Condition- Evidence Syntheses and Consultation Services”, or, in the case of “vaccine hesitancy”, a research grant program like “Encouraging Vaccine Confidence in Canada”, are avenues for researchers and professional consultants to align and cement their views with government actors.
Don’t get me wrong, I view this as an organic process with no ill will on either side (until proven otherwise). My concern is that this is not a healthy development for science, public health, social justice, or democracy, since we do need dissenting opinions, creative ways of thinking, and alternative solutions for many of society’s pressing social, economic, and environmental problems. We need approaches that prevent committing the best thinkers to a single, often simplistic way of doing things. Accordingly, public funds, like the one million dollars for the two tenders discussed here, should be dispersed in a sprinkler action rather than a one-directional flow!