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His comments come a day after the surgeon general issued a new opinion.
A day after the surgeon general warned Americans of what he called the “urgent threat of health misinformation,” President Joe Biden made no bones about it when asked for his message. platforms like Facebook on COVID-19 disinformation.
“They are killing people,” he said.
As the president left the White House for Camp David on Friday afternoon, he was asked, in particular, “On COVID disinformation, what’s your message to platforms like Facebook?”
Biden replied, “They’re killing people. I mean, it’s really – look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”
This was the only question Biden asked before boarding Marine One to leave town for the weekend and followed comments from other Biden administration officials warning of the dangers of misinformation in the fight against COVID-19.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Thursday released the Biden administration’s first public health advisory to tackle an epidemic of misinformation and misinformation and its damaging impact on public health. The Biden administration is now calling on social media companies to take further action to tackle misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccine.
Prior to Biden’s departure, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was pressed Friday by ABC News congressional correspondent Rachel Scott to see if Facebook was doing enough to tackle the problem.
“Clearly no,” Psaki said, “because we are talking about additional steps that should be taken.”
“We are dealing here with a matter of life and death. So everyone has a role to play in making sure that there is accurate information,” she added. “Clearly there are more that can be taken.”
Facebook took issue with the president’s description, saying in a statement that his claim was not true.
“We will not be distracted by accusations that are not supported by the facts,” Facebook spokesman Dani Lever said in a statement to ABC News. The point is, over 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the Internet. Over 3.3 million Americans have also used our vaccine finder to find out where and how to get vaccinated. The facts show that Facebook helps save lives. Period. “
It also comes amid current government pressure to raise vaccination rates to a standstill as the delta variant takes hold of the unvaccinated nationwide, in what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky called it “an unvaccinated pandemic” on Friday.
The Biden administration has redoubled efforts to get more people vaccinated – especially after the country missed the president’s goal of getting 70% of adults on at least one dose by July 4.
The Surgeon General’s new opinion specifically looks at social media platforms as having greatly contributed to the “unprecedented speed and scale” of the spread of disinformation and Murthy calls on tech and social media companies to ” take more responsibility to stop the spread of health misinformation online ”.
He argues that disinformation, especially on social media sites like Facebook, has hampered vaccination efforts, sowed mistrust, pushed people to reject public health measures, to use unproven treatments, to prolong the disease. pandemic and put lives at risk.
“Put simply, health misinformation has cost us our lives,” Murthy said from the White House Thursday.
ABC News’ Sasha Pezenik, Molly Nagle and Justin Gomez contributed to this report.
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