Facebook Suggests He’s More Effective Than Biden On Vaccines

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Facebook on Saturday responded to President Joe Biden for the second time in as many days, suggesting the company was more effective than the government in promoting Covid-19 vaccination after Biden said the social media giant was “killing people” with disinformation.

In response to a question Friday about his message to social media platforms regarding vaccinations, Biden said, “They are killing people.”

“The only epidemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and this – they are killing people,” he continued.

Facebook refuted the criticism on Friday, saying that 2 billion people have seen the science that vaccination works on the platform, and that more than 3.3 million Americans have used the vaccination search tool.

On Saturday, it doubled the volume of data, saying its data, collected with the help of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland, adds to a platform that appears to outperform the Biden administration in boosting “vaccine acceptance.”

“The data shows that 85% of Facebook users in the United States have received or want to be vaccinated against COVID-19,” said Jay Rosen, the company’s vice president of integrity. “President Biden’s goal was to have 70% of Americans vaccinated by the Fourth of July. And Facebook was not the reason why that goal was missed.

Facebook encouraged Americans to get vaccinated through tools including a vaccination search tool and optional “profile frames” that appear when friends are vaccinated.

Rosen said “vaccine frequency” on the platform has fallen 50 percent, ostensibly since the vaccines were introduced in January.

“We did our part,” he said in a Facebook-style statement posted on Saturday afternoon.

The Biden administration has admitted it missed its goal of at least partially vaccinating 70% of Americans by July 4, scoring a rate of 67%.

But the actual vaccination and the people expressing that they are less hesitant or more likely to get vaccinated are two different things.

Critics have noted that conservative and far-right outlets and numbers often associated with vaccine frequency dominate the daily list of the 10 best Facebook posts culled from the platform data of New York Times technology columnist Kevin Rose.

Fox News posts have always been the top performers on Facebook, taking the lead on Friday. An analysis by Media Matters For America Friday concluded that the majority of Fox News’s on-air content for most of June and part of July “relentlessly undermined” vaccination efforts.

“Fox’s Weekday Evening Opinion – Fox News Primetime, Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, The Ingraham Angle – surfaces allegations that undermine and downplay immunization in all segments of their coronavirus vaccine,” the report said.

With the delta type of coronavirus now responsible for more than half of new infections in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci said last week that more than 99 percent of people who died of Covid-19 in June had not been vaccinated.

As the infection rate in the United States has doubled in recent days, the rise largely attributed to a delta variant, and vaccines slowing, Biden administration officials have criticized the misinformation they blame for indecision.

“We have to realize that sometimes the most trusted voices are not the ones with the most followers on social media or the ones with the most name recognition,” said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Thursday.

Dennis Romero

Dennis Romero writes for Los Angeles-based NBC News.

Dylan Byers and Elise Perlmutter-Gumpiner contributed.

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