Bill Gates, Big Pharma and Facebook, CDC Funds Initiative to Help Minority Communities Hire ‘Influencers’ to Push Vaccines

The toolkit, first rolled out in 2022, is part of a suite of resources created by the CDC’s Partnering for Vaccine Equity Program (P4VE)

Bill Gates, Big Pharma and Facebook, CDC Funds Initiative to Help Minority Communities Hire ‘Influencers’ to Push Vaccines

The CDC’s Partnering for Vaccine Equity Program provides a toolkit for communities that helps them find and pay social media influencers to increase vaccine uptake in ethnic and racial minority communities.

by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

October 22, 2024

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in partnership with the CDC Foundation, funded a toolkit to train community-based organizations on how to hire influencers to combat “vaccine myths” in communities of color.

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

The toolkit, first rolled out in 2022, is part of a suite of resources created by the CDC’s Partnering for Vaccine Equity Program (P4VE), which targets ethnic and racial minority communities to increase vaccine uptake by funding “partnerships” with the CDC.

P4VE’s Vaccine Resource Hub is funded through a grant for over $80 million from the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It includes toolkits, unbranded digital materials and messaging in over 50 languages.

Community organizations can use the “Influencer Guide” to help them contact influencers who can spread the organizations’ messages in the influencers’ own voices.

The guide suggests targeting mid-level influencers — those who aren’t overly famous and who are preferably “self-made” — because they’re often seen as more relatable and trusted than large brands or celebrities on social media.

These influencers can effectively act as messengers with a wide reach to promote vaccination in racial and ethnic minority communities.

To maximize their online influence, the guide recommends community organizations first identify suitable candidates with a relevant background and who haven’t made “inappropriate” posts in the past.

Once they’ve identified the right influencers, organizations can ask influencers to partner with them to spread their message about, for example, the safety of COVID-19 vaccines for people in marginalized communities.

The guide provides advice on how to negotiate fees with influencers.

On Instagram, influencers with 1,000-10,000 followers typically get paid $10-100 per post, with rates increasing as follower counts rise. Instagram influencers with over a million followers typically receive $10,000 and up per post.

On TikTok, rates start at $5-25 per post and can increase to $2,500 and up per post for people with over a million followers.

The guide recommends organizations strike a balance between controlling what the influencer can say — ensuring the post doesn’t sound scripted — and allowing the influencer’s personality to come through.

After signing a contract, organizations can feed content to the influencer to post.

“It’s best,” the guide says, “to ask your influencer to use talking points supplied by your organization instead of sticking to an exact script, which can sound forced or promotional.”

Whose interests are P4VE promoting?

The “Influencer Guide” toolkit from the Resource Hub is just one example of many different programs sponsored by P4VE, which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in investments aimed at “promoting vaccine equity” in COVID-19 and flu vaccination among racial and ethnic minorities.

Launched in 2021 with supplemental COVID-19 funding, p4VE primarily aims to fund community organizations to spread the CDC’s pro-vaccine message — distributing over $156 million to over 500 organizations targeting racial and ethnic minorities across the U.S. to promote vaccines in 2021 alone.

P4VE’s work has been administered by multiple nonprofits, including the CDC Foundation and the Urban Institute — which primarily distributed P4VE money to community-based organizations.

In addition to running the P4VE Resource Hub, which creates resources like the “Influencer Guide,” the CDC Foundation’s role in P4VE includes partnering with 31 community organizations to increase vaccine uptake in their communities.

It also collaborates with five unnamed digital marketing and media partners to “combat misinformation about vaccines across social media channels and promote digital health literacy among communities experiencing disparities in immunization.”

The CDC Foundation is an independent nonprofit organization created by Congress to funnel private-sector resources into the CDC and CDC programs. From its founding in 1995 through 2023 the foundation raised $2.2 billion from private and government donors for its domestic and international programs.

Programs range from health communications, to increase confidence in public health institutions, to “data modernization” to improve health surveillance in the U.S., as well as to “global health” security initiatives — such as working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build disease surveillance labs in Africa or to create vaccine patches.

The CDC Foundation collaborates and also receives funding from other major foundations in public health, including the Public Health Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and Gavi, alongside most U.S. states.

It also takes money directly from companies like Merck and Pfizer, or from their philanthropic arms, such as the Moderna Charitable Foundation, the Johnson & Johnson Foundation and the GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, and Merck for Mothers.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Google also are listed as donors to the CDC Foundation.

The CDC since 2021 has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for the creation of “culturally tailored” pro-vaccine materials and for training “influential messengers” to promote COVID-19 and flu vaccines to communities of color across the country.

In March 2021, the Biden administration also earmarked $3 billion for the CDC to support local initiatives to “strengthen vaccine confidence.”

Such grants have been contingent on grantees assisting the government in the enforcement of “federal orders related to quarantine and isolation,” effectively making them enforcers of U.S. health agencies’ recommendations and federal mandates.

Grant recipients also are required to collect community-level data and provide it to the CDC.

As funding for COVID-19 interventions dries up, projects like P4VE are explicitly shifting their strategy to continue the same work of cultivating non-governmental “trusted messengers” to promote vaccines, while expanding the target populations to include children and other “priority populations” to justify the continuation of the program in the post-COVID-19 pandemic period.

Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender.