Source: Children’s Health Defense

A coalition of city public health officials with ties to pharma investor George Soros is urging the public to “get vaccinated.”

In an open letter, the Big Cities Health Coalition accused federal officials of driving down vaccination rates and fueling an increase in dangerous infectious disease outbreaks by making “repeated false claims” about vaccines.

They wrote:

“Vaccines have eradicated devastating diseases and saved millions of lives. They keep classrooms safe and schools open. They allow children to spend time with friends and enjoy their favorite activities. They help parents and caregivers work to support their families.

The letter also addresses recent changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommended vaccine schedule for children and adults, though it does not mention U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or President Donald Trump by name.

The coalition, which represents 35 U.S. cities and about a fifth of the U.S. population, “has been working together to exchange ideas and address public health threats for more than two decades,” according to CNN, which first reported on the letter Monday.

Participating cities include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Seattle.

The group’s financial documents reveal support from billionaire financier Soros. Soros has also invested heavily in the pharmaceutical industry, including COVID-19 vaccine makers Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and Gilead Sciences, which produces remdesivir, a controversial antiviral treatment frequently given to COVID-19 patients.

Coalition attempted to scrub funding from Soros- and Gates-linked groups

The Big Cities Health Coalition was founded in 2002, according to a now-deleted webpage. The current version of its website contains little more than the group’s recent letter.

Links to the organization’s 2023 and 2024 annual reports are no longer active, but can be found on the Internet Archive and elsewhere. The reports show that Soros and other major healthcare-related organizations, including groups connected to Bill Gates, finance the coalition.

According to its 2023 annual report, the Open Society Foundations, founded by Soros, funded the coalition. Other funders include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente and the CDC Foundation.

In 2022, the Soros Economic Development Fund, an extension of the Open Society Foundations, partnered with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and MedAccess, a pharma-industry broker connected to the U.K. government, to invest $200 million in developing COVID-19 vaccines.

The Gates Foundation is a major funder of Gavi.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has financially supported FactCheck.org, which previously flagged COVID-19-related “misinformation” for Facebook.

The CDC Foundation’s donor list includes the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation and vaccine manufacturers including Pfizer, Merck and Johnson & Johnson.

According to internal medicine physician Dr. Clayton J. Baker, the coalition’s annual reports reveal clear conflicts of interest.

“It’s informative to look into the funding of organizations like the Big Cities Health Coalition,” Baker said. He noted that Kaiser Permanente paid patients $50 to get COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic and fired employees who refused the shots, then tried to rehire them later when short-staffed.

According to the coalition’s Form 990 for fiscal year 2023, the organization spent $875,540 on “communications,” including engaging with “media, and federal policymakers about the importance of supporting local public health and health equity.”

The group also spent $433,703 on its “urban health agenda” and $147,397 on “equity/racial justice.”

The coalition’s members “meet periodically with Congressional staff” and “other federal government officials,” the filing states.

The organization’s schedule of contributors is listed as “restricted” in the filing.

Coalition blames unvaccinated for ‘deadly’ and ‘more frequent’ outbreaks

In its letter, the coalition blamed “declining” vaccination rates for “deadly outbreaks of diseases like measles and polio” and claimed that the outbreaks are “becoming more frequent.”

CNN reported that measles exposure at a South Carolina school led authorities to quarantine over 100 unvaccinated students, illustrating “one of the many reasons why Big Cities Health Coalition emphasizes the importance of vaccination.”

Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., said that invoking measles and polio is a “manipulative framing device.” He said:

“Outbreaks of these diseases occur almost exclusively in highly vaccinated populations where immunity has waned, or where sanitation and migration variables are misattributed as ‘vaccine refusal.’

“By portraying every outbreak as proof of anti-vaccine rhetoric, the coalition seeks to recapture moral high ground based on presumptions of safety, without addressing the underlying immunologic and ecological data.”

The coalition’s letter also warned of a potential uptick of COVID-19 and flu infections in the “rapidly approaching” cold and flu season.

However, Baker said the coalition’s letter “contains absolutely zero genuine evidence” to support its claims. He said:

“The coalition’s statement is embarrassingly inane. They say, ‘We are united behind a simple message: get vaccinated.’ Vaccinated with what? They make no distinction between necessary or unnecessary, safe or unsafe, effective or ineffective shots. Just ‘get vaccinated.’ That’s like saying ‘get medicated.’ This is the asinine level of rhetoric to which vaccine fanatics are currently reduced.”

Emily Hilliard, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), dismissed the coalition’s concerns.

“HHS is restoring the doctor-patient relationship so people can make informed decisions about their health with their providers,” Hilliard told The Defender.

Letter rooted in data, not ‘political ideology,’ coalition members say

Coalition members told CNN their letter is an attempt to restore public trust in science, not an effort to politicize public health recommendations.

“We have to make our public health decisions based on data and not on political ideology,” Dr. Philip Huang, director of the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department, told CNN. “We have to be the voices for that science and reason.”

Huang said the current CDC administration “seems more driven by political ideology than actual data and science, so it undermines the trust.”

Lyons-Weiler disputed the coalition’s claims, calling the letter “the opening salvo in an attempt to rebuild centralized narrative control over immunization policy.”

“Language such as ‘talk with your doctor’ and ‘tune out political noise’ is designed to sound apolitical while reinstating top-down message discipline,” he said.

CDC changes to vaccine policy spark pushback across U.S.

The coalition “is the latest group to take a strong public stand in support of vaccination as a direct response to concerns that the federal government is limiting access and raising doubts,” CNN reported.

Earlier this month, the CDC updated the childhood immunization schedule to recommend individual-based decision-making regarding COVID-19 vaccination for children 6 months and older, following the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) unanimous vote to adopt the recommendation.

Last month, ACIP also voted to recommend limiting the MMRV (measles, mumps, rubella and varicella, or chickenpox) vaccine to children ages 4 and older. And in June, the committee voted to stop recommending flu shots containing thimerosal — a preservative linked to neurodevelopmental disorders.

In response, 15 Democratic governors launched the Governors Public Health Alliance last week to coordinate their public health efforts independently of national public health agencies.

Previously, four Western states announced the formation of the West Coast Health Alliance, which aims to issue its own immunization guidelines.

In August, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued “evidence-based” recommendations calling for COVID-19 shots for infants, young children and children in “high-risk” groups. In July, the AAP and five other medical organizations sued Kennedy over new COVID-19 vaccine guidance.

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