[ad_1]
Social media companies are not fulfilling their responsibility to regulate the spread of disinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine on their platforms, Dr Scott Gottlieb said on CNBC on Monday.
Network giants like Facebook and Twitter allow accounts to rack up many followers and be verified, giving those users a franchise, he said in an appearance on “Squawk Box.”
“If they give someone a very big platform to disseminate information, they have an obligation to watch the information that is disseminated,” said Gottlieb, former head of the United States Food and Drug Administration. under former President Donald Trump. “I think they have a positive responsibility here, and in some cases they don’t.”
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on Gottlieb’s comments. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
The comments echo those of President Joe Biden, who said on Friday that social platforms like Facebook were killing people by allowing disinformation about the Covid vaccine to spread across their platforms. However, Biden retracted part of that statement on Monday, saying he instead intended to accuse a dozen users, but not the social media platform itself, of spreading deadly disinformation about Covid vaccines.
This followed comments from White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who said earlier today that the administration was reporting problematic Facebook posts that peddled misleading or false information about vaccinations. Psaki had also suggested steps Facebook and other social media services can take to tackle false stories, such as publicly sharing the impact of disinformation on their services, promoting quality information, and taking faster action against it. harmful publications.
Facebook disputed the comments coming from the White House. A company spokesperson said on Saturday that the platform had, in fact, posted authoritative information about Covid and vaccines, and also encouraged people to use its vaccine finder.
Gottlieb, who sits on the board of directors of vaccine maker Covid-19 Pfizer, said Twitter, not just Facebook, is responsible for vaccine misinformation. The administration newsgroups that are currently working to resolve the issue are targeting Facebook, as many people specifically indicate what information they have seen on the site.
“I think the line is [crossed] when you publish knowingly false information, “said Gottlieb, a CNBC contributor.” When you publish false scientific data, false information in a very misleading way, that is clearly a line, and it goes on, so I think it’s easy to control. “
Deaths from Covid are on the rise again in the United States as the highly transmissible delta variant spreads in largely unvaccinated communities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 161 million Americans are fully immunized, although the rate of vaccines administered daily has slowed significantly in recent months, according to a CDC tracker.
Gottlieb again urged the CDC to track all breakthrough infections that occur in those vaccinated, and not just those among those infected who are hospitalized.
“I don’t think it’s an overwhelming number, but we’re not tracking it here in the United States and that’s the bottom line. We should be tracking it,” Gottlieb said. “We should also have a better idea of whether or not this is a more transmissible strain, even among the vaccinated.”
He told CNBC on Friday that he believed the United States “vastly underestimates” the number of Covid delta infections, especially among vaccinated people with mild symptoms or a breakthrough case, making it difficult to understand if the strain causes higher than expected hospitalization and death rate.
People who have been infected with the virus in the past and are at low risk of infection should still get vaccinated to develop “very robust and long-lasting immunity,” Gottlieb said.
A booster of a Covid vaccine would only be an additional dose of a current vaccine, Gottlieb said, adding that “the existing vaccine is very protective against the delta variant based on the information we have.”
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a contributor to CNBC and serves on the boards of directors of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, health technology company Aetion, and biotech company Illumina. He is also co-chair of the Healthy Sail Panel of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean.
[ad_2]
Source link