By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Baltimore, MD — For nearly a year, a small group of Baltimore teenagers was paid to convince other teenagers to get a COVID-19 vaccine. The money came from Washington; the strategy was compared by its own architects to how advertisers use children to pressure their parents, and by the organizers’ own admission, they could not show it actually increased vaccination.
The program was called Voices on Vax. It ran from October 2021 through August 2022 out of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, funded through a federal grant that drew fresh scrutiny this month after conservative journalist Natalie Winters published a detailed account of the campaign’s finances and tactics. MDBayNews found no prior Maryland reporting that examined the campaign’s federal funding, paid-content model, and subsequent academic evaluation together, and spent the past several days independently verifying Winters’ reporting against primary sources, then digging further into how the money moved, what the campaign’s own organizers have said about it since, and whether Baltimore was an outlier or part of a wider pattern.
The short version: the core facts check out, the people who ran it have since described their own methods in surprisingly candid terms, and at least one other city ran a strikingly similar program on the same federal dime.
Where the money came from
In 2021, the CDC handed out $13 million to a national network of 26 university-based Prevention Research Centers, with each center receiving a flat $500,000 supplement to build what the agency called a “Vaccine Confidence Network,” according to an archived CDC.gov page from that period. Johns Hopkins’ Center for Adolescent Health, one of the 26 centers, was funded through that same $500,000 supplement to launch Voices on Vax that March. The Hopkins paper does not break out how much of that supplement went to Voices on Vax specifically versus the center’s other work, so the $500,000 figure should be read as the funding source, not a confirmed program budget.
The campaign paired the Hopkins center with the Johns Hopkins Institute for Vaccine Safety, the youth nonprofit HeartSmiles, the nonprofit Hip Hop Public Health, Baltimore City Public Schools and the Baltimore City Health Department. A communications firm, Element A LLC, also worked the account.
Three Baltimore teenagers from HeartSmiles, ages 16, 18 and 19, were hired as “youth ambassadors,” according to the peer-reviewed write-up the campaign’s own organizers later published in the journal Progress in Community Health Partnerships. Two of them, Sydney Johnson and Taylor Clinton, are listed as co-authors on that paper alongside a third ambassador, James Gaither. WMAR-2 News, which covered the campaign in 2021, separately reported that it had four youth ambassadors in total. The ambassadors were trained in vaccine science and media messaging, then set loose to run the @VoicesOnVax Instagram account, interview peers about their vaccination decisions, and give interviews to local television and radio.
$20 memes and $1,000 rap contests
The campaign’s most notable feature was its “Content Creators’ Lab,” which paid outside teenagers $20 for each accepted meme, artwork, or TikTok-style video promoting the vaccine. The organizers’ own paper credits the tactic as one of the campaign’s more effective moves.
Voices on Vax also ran two contests, open to participants ages 13 to 24, that asked entrants to write and record a song containing at least three vaccine facts. Winners, chosen by online audience vote, received $1,000. Both winning entries were rap tracks. Winters’ original reporting cites a surviving Facebook post from Baltimore radio station 92Q Jams promoting the second contest, marked with a #sponsored tag; MDBayNews has not independently verified that post, though it matches the timeline in the Hopkins paper.
A related but separately funded effort, Hip Hop Public Health’s “Community Immunity: Teen Takeover,” produced two animated music videos featuring Baltimore artists TayyBandz, Young Elder and Soul. That project built on Hip Hop Public Health’s broader Community Immunity work, which also featured Run-DMC’s Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, and drew on a larger $2.5 million CDC award administered through the CDC Foundation, according to the nonprofit’s own press release from March 2022. The two efforts shared partners and some of the same Baltimore artists without being the same program, and MDBayNews has not established the full extent of the overlap between them.
What taxpayers got for it
By the organizers’ own accounting, published years later in an academic journal, the results were thin:
- The Voices on Vax website drew 2,573 unique visitors over eleven months, only 606 of whom were identified as Baltimore residents.
- The average visit lasted 48 seconds.
- The Instagram account finished the campaign with 258 followers, though its 138 posts and related content reportedly reached 22,299 accounts.
- Only 112 people completed the campaign’s voluntary survey, out of thousands of site visitors.
“The campaign’s design made it impossible to draw a straight line between the ads and any actual increase in vaccination rates.”
The Hopkins researchers, in their own published conclusions, acknowledged “difficulties engaging the priority population” and said the campaign’s design made it impossible to draw a straight line between the ads and any actual increase in vaccination rates. The people who did respond skewed heavily toward those who needed no convincing: of the 112 adults who completed the campaign’s survey, 84% already believed COVID vaccination was important, more than 90% had already received at least one dose, and of the 67 respondents with children, 73% said their child had received at least one dose. The researchers acknowledged those numbers suggested their survey respondents did not reflect the Black Baltimore families the campaign was principally designed to reach.
“The people who did respond skewed heavily toward those who needed no convincing.”
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Institutional Review Board determined the project “did not meet criteria for human subjects research,” according to the paper. The campaign’s evaluation instead relied primarily on website analytics, a voluntary pop-up survey, and reflections from the youth ambassadors rather than a controlled effectiveness study. At the time the campaign launched, Baltimore City’s vaccination rate for teens ages 12 to 17 stood at 44%, compared with a 63% statewide average, according to WMAR’s 2021 reporting.
In the organizers’ own words
Voices on Vax was not a secret program at the time. It was covered by WMAR and WBAL without apparent controversy, and its methods and spending were later published, without apparent objection, in an academic journal by the people who ran it. What sharpened this month, beyond the renewed public attention, was a second look at how the campaign’s own architects have described their strategy since.
In an October 2024 episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast, published on Johns Hopkins University Press’s own website, three of the campaign’s organizers sat down with a Hopkins publicist to reflect on the project two years after it wrapped. Lori Rose Benson, executive director and CEO of Hip Hop Public Health, was direct about the thinking behind recruiting minors as messengers: the approach, she said, borrowed from how marketers use children to pressure their parents into purchases, a dynamic she called “that pester power.” She made the comparison directly after noting that most Marylanders under 18 required adult consent to receive a COVID vaccine at the time, meaning the campaign’s teen messengers were built to influence the adults who actually could authorize a shot.
“The approach, she said, borrowed from how marketers use children to pressure their parents into purchases—a dynamic she called ‘that pester power.’”
Taylor Clinton, one of the original youth ambassadors, offered an even more candid account of what draws teenagers to this kind of work. Teens often join these programs, she said, “because, you know, we’re getting paid, or because our parents told us to.” Clinton said in the same breath that her own reasons were different, that she wanted to inform her community. But the observation, that payment is often the real draw, is notable coming from inside the program itself.
“Teens often join these programs, she said, ‘because, you know, we’re getting paid, or because our parents told us to.’”
Tamar Mendelson, who directs Johns Hopkins’ Center for Adolescent Health, described the funding as “a really unusual opportunity” that came through a CDC push during the pandemic to get its network of prevention centers promoting vaccine uptake.
Why this is landing differently now
Voices on Vax wrapped more than three years ago. What has changed is the political climate around vaccine policy in Annapolis and Washington. In April, Gov. Wes Moore signed the “Vax Act,” a law that formally decouples Maryland’s vaccine recommendations from federal guidance, a direct response to changes the federal government made, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to scale back the CDC’s recommended childhood immunization schedule. Moore said at the signing that the state’s vaccine policy would be “driven by science and not driven by internet conspiracy theories.” Maryland Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey countered that “creating a separate Maryland track is unnecessary and sets a troubling precedent,” and Senate Minority Whip Justin Ready criticized the law for putting advocacy groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics on par with federal health authorities.
That fight, over how much Maryland should continue relying on federal vaccine guidance, is the backdrop against which a story about the CDC paying teenagers to sell vaccines to their own peers is now being read.
Baltimore wasn’t the only city
The $13 million Vaccine Confidence Network supplement did not stop at Baltimore’s city line. The Prevention Research Center at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts, ran its own youth ambassador campaign under a CDC cooperative agreement numbered 6U48DP006381, a near match to the numbering on Hopkins’ award. The center’s own materials describe the work as “supported by the Vaccine Confidence Network,” the same CDC initiative behind Voices on Vax.
The Worcester effort trained nine youth, ages 18 to 22, as vaccine ambassadors, according to a peer-reviewed write-up its organizers published in the journal Health Promotion Practice. Researchers were explicit about the underlying theory, describing the ambassadors as “trusted messengers” whose personal vaccination stories became the campaign’s messaging, aimed at influencing peers and family members. That paper puts precise numbers on the campaign’s reach: 2,086 flyers, 386 posters, 10 billboards and 40 bus ads, distributed through three social media platforms, two radio stations and two local TV outlets. A later campaign infographic from the same center cites a larger cumulative total, more than 28 million impressions across social media, billboards, bus signs, radio and local TV, with 42 partner agencies involved, which may reflect an extended campaign period beyond what the peer-reviewed paper covers. A related track trained 16 “family vaccine ambassadors” in Worcester and two in nearby Southbridge, each assigned to contact 10 to 20 families directly.
MDBayNews found no public record confirming whether Worcester’s ambassadors were paid per post the way Baltimore’s were; the center’s public materials do not disclose a specific dollar figure for youth compensation, and that detail remains unconfirmed.
The national network itself is no longer in dispute. CDC-affiliated researchers published an evaluation of the Vaccine Confidence Network in 2025 in the journal Vaccine, describing all 26 university-based Prevention Research Centers as participants in the one-year initiative, with centers around the country recruiting community “intermediaries,” trusted local organizations, to promote vaccine confidence and uptake. What remains unclear is how many of those 26 centers went as far as Baltimore and Worcester in specifically recruiting young people as the messengers, and whether any beyond Baltimore paid teenagers directly for content.
“What remains unclear is how many of those 26 centers went as far as Baltimore and Worcester in specifically recruiting young people as the messengers.”
Where the Baltimore money landed
Tax filings offer a partial picture of who benefited financially from Baltimore’s version of the campaign. HeartSmiles Inc., the youth-development nonprofit that supplied and helped train Voices on Vax’s teen ambassadors, reported $1.9 million in revenue in its most recent IRS filing, according to records maintained by ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. Executive Director Joni Holifield, who is also a listed co-author on the campaign’s published research paper, was paid $117,454 that year. Those figures describe HeartSmiles’ finances broadly and are not a claim about how much of that revenue traces to Voices on Vax specifically, which is not broken out in the nonprofit’s public filings. Separately, grant-tracking service Kindora’s compilation of HeartSmiles’ own tax disclosures lists Johns Hopkins University as a funder of HeartSmiles, totaling roughly $81,000 across two grants, a relationship distinct from the CDC money that flowed through Hopkins to run the ambassador program itself.
What remains unverified
Winters’ original report attributed a $4.17 million lifetime total to the underlying federal award, ASST_NON_U48DP006384_075, that funds Johns Hopkins’ Center for Adolescent Health as a Prevention Research Center. MDBayNews could not independently confirm that figure; USAspending.gov’s award page did not return readable data on repeated attempts. It should be treated as reported, not confirmed, and it’s worth noting that figure covers the center’s entire multiyear PRC funding, not Voices on Vax alone.
As of this writing, MDBayNews found no public response from Johns Hopkins, Hip Hop Public Health, HeartSmiles or the CDC addressing the renewed attention, and none of the original youth ambassadors have commented on the current story.
What to Watch
Whether Maryland’s congressional delegation or state lawmakers weigh in, given the campaign’s overlap with the ongoing state-federal vaccine policy fight, is worth tracking. So is whether any of the other 25 Prevention Research Centers that received the same CDC supplement ran comparable youth campaigns, a question that would turn this from a Baltimore story into a fully national one. A separate 2025 paper in Vaccine identifies a working group of six Prevention Research Centers, in Alabama, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina and Texas, that specifically studied the use of trusted messengers; that group is a reasonable starting point for anyone trying to map how widespread Baltimore-style ambassador programs became, though it is not evidence that those states paid teenagers.
Sources: This report draws on Natalie Winters’ Sept. 9, 2026, Substack investigation, “The CDC Paid Baltimore Teens To Make Pro-Vaccine Memes, TikToks and Rap Videos”; the peer-reviewed paper “The Voices on Vax Campaign: Lessons Learned from Engaging Youth to Promote COVID Vaccination,” by Terrinieka W. Powell, Tamar Mendelson and co-authors at Johns Hopkins, published in Progress in Community Health Partnerships, Volume 18, Number 3 (Fall 2024); an archived Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage on the Prevention Research Centers program; a March 30, 2022, press release from Hip Hop Public Health distributed via PR Newswire; WMAR-2 News’ 2021 report “New campaign tackles vaccine hesitancy in Baltimore teens”; the Hopkins Press Podcast transcript “Voices On Vax – Engaging Youth to Promote Covid Vaccination” (Season 3, Episode 4, Oct. 24, 2024), published by Johns Hopkins University Press; the Baltimore Sun’s April 14, 2026, report “Maryland severs vaccine ties with federal government in newly signed law,” as syndicated by The Spokesman-Review; the Maryland General Assembly’s fiscal and policy note for HB 637 (2026 session); Minkah et al., “Empowering Youth Vaccine Ambassadors to Promote COVID-19 Vaccination in Local Communities: A 7-Step Approach,” published in Health Promotion Practice (2023), and a related campaign infographic from the Prevention Research Center at UMass Chan Medical School; Chuvileva et al., “Weaving a public health network: Process and results from an evaluation of CDC’s Prevention Research Centers Vaccine Confidence Network,” published in Vaccine (2025); and HeartSmiles Inc.’s IRS Form 990 data as compiled by ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer and Kindora.
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