The City of Baltimore's public school system used a youth ambassador program to push the COVID-19 vaccine on children enrolled in district schools, the Washington Examiner reports.
The youth ambassador program was part of the Baltimore Equitable Vaccination Initiative Project, documents obtained by the activist group Parents Defending Education and viewed by the Examiner show. According to the records, the project was funded by a $180,000 grant from billionaire donor George Soros' Alliance for Open Society International.
Staff from Baltimore City Public Schools, Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and the Open Society nonprofit discussed "having [a] collective group of youth ambassadors work together to increase COVID vaccine confidence and uptake amount [in] young people," the emails show.
The three organizations also reportedly partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation.
The youth ambassador program was described as a program to "coordinate youth vax outreach to create youth centered website and materials," in a spreadsheet about "grant roles and responsibilities."
Grant recipients were also responsible for providing "vaccination awareness to reduce vaccine hesitancy via various schoolbased workshops or sessions which may be co-facilitated with students," according to the spreadsheet.
The grant funds were also spent on an $8,000 vaccine incentives program, which gave away items such as gift cards and provided food for vaccine recipients and workshop attendees, as well as social media advertising, which cost $2,000, according to the Examiner.
In September, Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Financial Times that the attitudes of COVID-19 "anti-vaxxers" may have a damaging effect on traditional childhood vaccination rates.
"I'm concerned the acceleration of an anti-vaxxer attitude in certain segments of the population ... might spill over into that kind of a negative attitude towards childhood vaccinations," Fauci said at the time.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, said Fauci fails to recognize that he is the one "fueling" traditional vaccine skepticism.
"The vaccine mandates pushed by Tony Fauci, as well as the overstating of the efficacy of the COVID vaccines against infection have fueled vaccine skepticism," Bhattacharya told Newsmax in September.
The professor noted that mRNA technology is not found in any other type of vaccine except for COVID vaccines. He added that Fauci's conflating of mRNA vaccines with traditional vaccines has created a kind of "fanaticism."
Newsmax contacted Baltimore City Public Schools for comment on this story.