The official White House Twitter account made a false coronavirus claim on Thursday that said there was no vaccine available when United States President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
The verified account shared to some of its seven million followers that there were millions of unemployed Americans and that no vaccine against the health crisis was manufactured yet. The post continued that in the last 15 months, the economy has created 8.3 million jobs and that the unemployment rate sat at 3.6%.
White House False Claim
The account noted that this was the fastest decline in unemployment to start a United States president's term ever recorded. However, eagle-eyed critics immediately pointed out that the 79-year-old Democrat was actually able to receive his first dose of the coronavirus vaccine before he was sworn in, in December 2020.
One Twitter user took the time to dig through social media history and shared a photo of a masked Biden getting the vaccine. In the original tweet, the president said he was getting his COVID-19 vaccine and thanked the scientists and researchers who worked tirelessly to make the vaccine, as per the New York Post.
Later on Jan. 13, 2021, the official White House account shared a 33-second video that showed the president getting his second dose of the vaccine. The account said that Biden was doing so because he "trusts scientists."
Data showed that roughly 3.5 million people were already fully vaccinated and at least 19 million already had their first dose by the time President Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021. The data was taken from statistics published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and came as the U.S. administered an average of more than one million doses per day at the time.
According to CNN, the first dose that was administered outside of clinical trials was given on Dec.14, 2020, while former President Donald Trump was still in office. Biden was able to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that obtained emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Dec. 11, 2020, under Trump's presidency.
Biden's Coronavirus Vaccine Shots
What would have been factual for the White House Twitter account to say was that vaccine availability was "limited" when Biden took office. It was only in April 2021 that all adults in every state became eligible for the vaccine.
The situation comes after the Biden administration has claimed that it aims to fight misinformation at all costs, previously establishing a "Disinformation Governance Board." Big Tech companies, such as Twitter, have also flagged posts they claim contain misinformation on various issues.
The social media giant, which has previously taken steps to prevent misinformation on its platform, states in its guidelines that users "may not use Twitter's services to share false or misleading information about COVID-19 which may lead to harm."
The policy also states that any content related to COVID-19 will be considered in violation if it's "demonstrably false or misleading, based on widely available, authoritative sources." The company said that these violations could force users to become locked out of their accounts until the inaccurate post was deleted, Fox News reported.
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