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Joe Biden’s administration renewed its assault on social media companies spreading misinformation about Covid-19 on Sunday, as new infections continued to rise across the United States.
Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general who has accused companies including Facebook of “poisoning the news” about coronavirus vaccines, said they were not doing enough to verify the proliferation of false claims online.
“The reality is that disinformation continues to spread like wildfire in our country, aided and abetted by technology platforms,” he told Fox News on Sunday.
“I am worried about what will happen because we are seeing an increase in cases among the unvaccinated in particular. It is so important that people have the information they need about the vaccine… it is our fastest and most effective way out of this pandemic. “
New cases of Covid-19 in the United States, fueled by the highly transmissible variant Delta, increased by 70% in one week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday to more than 26,300 per day.
Cases were increasing in 48 states and stagnating in the other two, the CDC said. Four states, California, Florida, Missouri and Texas, were responsible for 46% of new cases, with one in five coming from Florida.
“This is becoming an unvaccinated pandemic,” CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky said on Friday, noting that only 48.5% of American adults were fully vaccinated, and that 99.5% of new Covid-19 hospitalizations were people who had not been shot.
Murthy’s comments on Sunday came after a feud between the government and Facebook, sparked by Biden’s statement last week that the company was “killing people” by failing to curb the spread of vaccine misinformation. Meanwhile, prominent Republican politicians and right-wing television figures have been publicly skeptical of the vaccinations, leading to reluctance among their supporters to receive them.
Facebook hit back on Saturday with a blog post highlighting the steps it has taken, including removing more than 18 million items of “disinformation.”
In interviews, company officials accused the administration of “looking for scapegoats” for its own failure to meet Biden’s goal of having 70% of American adults at least partially immunized by the 4 vacation. July, and said that, at least privately, Murthy praised the company’s efforts.
On Sunday, however, the surgeon general said his take on social media companies was unchanged.
“Some have worked to try and promote specific sources, like the CDC and other medical sources. Others have tried to reduce the prevalence of bogus sources in research results. But what I also told them, in public and in private, is that it is not enough, that we still see a proliferation of disinformation online, ”he told State of the Union. from CNN.
“And we know that health misinformation harms people’s health. It costs them their lives. Health misinformation robs us of our freedom and power to make decisions for ourselves and our families. Platforms need to recognize that they have played a major role in increasing the speed and scale with which disinformation spreads. “
Amy Klobuchar, a U.S. Democratic senator from Minnesota, said on Sunday that she believed Facebook should face consequences, and referred to a so-called “dirty dozen” online figures who, according to a study, were responsible for 65% of Covid-19 disinformation in general, and 73% on Facebook.
“Look at the numbers from the Kaiser Foundation, two-thirds of people who haven’t been vaccinated say [it’s] because they have something on social media, ”she told CNN.
“For months, I faced the dirty dozen, some were taken off their accounts. But there is more to do. We should also consider changing the accountability standards for vaccine misinformation. There’s absolutely no reason they couldn’t be able to better monitor this and get this shit off their platforms.
A CBS News poll released on Sunday showed growing reluctance to receive a vaccine. 53% of those polled said they were worried about side effects, up from 43% in June, and 45% said they “don’t trust the science” behind vaccines, a 12% increase from compared to the previous month.
In Missouri, one of the states with the lowest vaccination rates, a spike in cases has led hospital officials to take to Twitter to urge residents to get vaccinated.
Ken McClure, the mayor of Springfield, said circulating misinformation was at least partly responsible for the rise.
“People are talking about health fears, what it might do to them later in life, what the vaccines might contain,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation.
“This information is simply incorrect. And I think we as a society and certainly in our community are hurt by it. The push is coming, the Delta variant will be there, it will spread, it is already spreading all over Missouri. I hope people can learn about our experience here in Springfield.
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