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The Democratic National Committee and other White House allies want mobile carriers to examine phone messages and social media posts for alleged false information about pressure from the Biden administration to vaccinate more people. Americans against the coronavirus, Politico reported on Monday.
According to the outlet, the White House is pushing back harder on criticism of its messages after failing to meet the goal of having 70% of American adults receive at least one dose of the vaccine by July 4.
Part of that effort, Politico reported, “plans to more aggressively engage fact-checkers and work with SMS [Short Message Service] carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines ”.
A text quoted by the outlet, sent by Turning Point USA and co-founder Charlie Kirk, read, “Biden is sending DOOR-TO-DOOR henchmen to get you a Covid-19 vaccine. Sign the petition for: No Medical Raids in America.
“We are firmly committed to keeping politics out of efforts to vaccinate every American so that we can save lives and help our economy recover further,” White House spokesman Kevin Munoz said. “When we see deliberate efforts to spread disinformation, we see it as an obstacle to the public health of the country and we will not hesitate to call it out.”
The latest flashpoint in the messaging battle is President Biden’s announcement last week that “we have to go community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and often door to door – literally knocking on doors – to get help for those remaining protected from the virus. “
Republican lawmakers have expressed outrage at the prospect. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster on Friday called on state health officials to ban unsolicited door-to-door vaccination efforts, arguing that it “would further deteriorate public confidence and could have potentially disastrous consequences for public safety ”.
This drew a rebuke from White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who said on Friday that “the failure to provide accurate public health information, including the effectiveness of vaccines and their accessibility to people across the country, including South Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should take that into account.
Meanwhile, Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) suggested in an interview with the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this weekend that the “mechanisms” used by the Biden administration to encourage vaccination could be used to “go door to door and grab your guns.” They could go door to door and take your Bibles.
The White House has sought to emphasize that those involved in the outreach effort are not federal employees, but rather, in Psaki’s words, “grassroots volunteers.”
“They are clergy, they are volunteers who believe that people across the country, especially in areas with low vaccination rates, should have accurate information, should have information on where they can go. get vaccinated, where they can save their own lives and the lives of neighbors and the lives of family members, ”she said on Friday.
White House chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci carried the message on Sunday talk shows and brushed aside what he described as the “ideological rigidity” of anti-vaccines.
“There is no reason not to get the vaccine,” Fauci told CNN’s “State of the Union”. “Why do we have red states and places in the South that are very strongly ideological in a way that don’t want to get vaccinated?” Vaccinations have nothing to do with politics. It is a public health problem. It doesn’t matter who you are. The virus does not know if you are a Democrat, Republican, or Independent. Of course, we know that.
“And yet there is this gap between people who want to get vaccinated and don’t want to be vaccinated, which is really unfortunate because it costs lives.”
On Monday evening, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 67.7% of American adults (nearly 174.8 million people) had received at least one dose of the vaccine and 159.5 million Americans ( 48% of the total population) were considered fully vaccinated.
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