People have very limited bandwidth. You can only dedicate so much energy to care about things at a given moment. Bedbugs aren’t a huge threat society wide, but individually they’re devastating. So if you spend a bunch of personal energy and effort on making sure you don’t bring bed bugs into your home, what things are you not paying attention to that normally would be a big deal?

Viral outrage campaigns don’t need to be devastating on their own. Their purpose is to keep people distracted, tired, and apathetic.

The fact that you think this is an embarrassingly unsuccessful endeavor implies to me that they are doing a good job obscuring their actual objectives.