After a promising start to the year, the White House has hit a wall on COVID-19 vaccinations and is looking for culprits to blame for why many remain hesitant to get their shots.
One early target was Facebook and other social media platforms, where information — and misinformation — spread quickly. “They’re killing people … look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden told reporters as he departed the White House for a trip to Camp David. “And they’re killing people.”
The comments triggered a flurry of speculation about new government regulations to slow the sharing of anti-vaccine sentiment on social media. Facebook responded that when it came to vaccination failures, Biden should look in the mirror. “President Biden’s goal was for 70% of Americans to be vaccinated by July 4. Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed,” a vice president at the company protested in a statement.
Biden quickly moved to clarify his Facebook stance, even as the White House’s position on social media regulation related to COVID-19 remained unclear.
“Facebook isn’t killing people — these 12 people are out there giving misinformation. Anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it. It’s killing people. It’s bad information,” Biden said, in an apparent reference to a dozen accounts that have ostensibly been spreading the most misinformation. “My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally, that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people, that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine. That’s what I meant.”
Next up was Fox News, where some popular hosts have made skeptical claims about the safety of the vaccines and the use of government power to mandate them. As was the case with Facebook, there were reports of tense meetings between the White House and the cable news network.
After Fox ran some segments encouraging people to get vaccinated, Biden began to mock the organization at a CNN town hall in Ohio. “But if you noticed, as they say in that southern part of my state, ‘They’ve had an altar call,’ some of those guys,” he said as the mostly friendly audience laughed. “All of a sudden, they’re out there saying, ‘Let’s get vaccinated. Let’s get vaccinated.’”
The president then caught himself. “I shouldn’t make fun,” Biden said. “That’s good. It’s good.”
Although 339 million doses have been delivered and more than two-thirds of adults have received at least one shot, just under half of the public is fully vaccinated. The numbers are higher among at-risk age groups, with 81.3% of those age 65 to 74 fully vaccinated and 77.4% of those age 75 and up.
But stubborn pockets of resistance remain, especially in white rural conservative communities that voted for former President Donald Trump and black communities that vote overwhelmingly Democratic. The vaccine has also yet to be approved for children under 12, and fewer than 11% of people under 18 are fully vaccinated.
The first group has received the most attention as the Biden administration has faced scrutiny over the failure to get over the vaccination hump. Some prominent conservative social media influencers have positioned themselves as vaccine skeptics, and even many on the Right who reject that view opposed White House talk of policing these tech platforms for misinformation based partly on the suppression of the Wuhan lab origins theory.
Even with a real anti-vaxxer presence online, some see scapegoating from the administration. “It would help if the FDA would give final approval to it,” said Republican strategist John Feehery. “I do think Biden will face the same issue as Trump. He is not in complete control of the situation. Many of the decision-makers at the local level are completely unqualified to make decisions, and yet they are the ones who are returning to pandemic panic.”
The spread of the highly transmissible delta variant, although with a high-profile breakthrough infection of a vaccinated White House aide and a brief scare following Vice President Kamala Harris’s exposure to COVID-19 in a meeting with Texas Democrats, has undercut the perception that the pandemic is winding down. The return of mask mandates is under discussion. If numbers continue to spike, it could interrupt the economic reopening that is producing record growth.
Biden has continued to push vaccines over masks. The promise to manage the pandemic better than Trump was a winning issue for him during the campaign, and he has received high marks on the issue as president. A CBS News/YouGov poll gave him a 66% approval rating on his handling of the coronavirus, including 41% among conservatives.
