“Some have worked to try to up-promote accurate sources, like the CDC and other medical sources. On Sunday, however, the surgeon general said his view of social media companies was unchanged. In interviews, company officials have accused the administration of “seeking scapegoats” for its own failure to reach Biden’s target of having 70% of US adults at least partially vaccinated by the 4 July holiday, and say that, privately at least, Murthy had praised the company’s efforts.
Meanwhile, prominent Republican politicians and rightwing TV personalities have been publicly skeptical about vaccinations, leading to a reluctance among their supporters to receive them.įacebook hit back on Saturday with a blog post highlighting the steps it has taken, including the removal of more than 18m pieces of “misinformation”. Murthy’s comments on Sunday came after a spat 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 misinformation over vaccines. “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the CDC’s director, Dr Rochelle Walensky, said on Friday, noting that only 48.5% of US adults were fully vaccinated, and that 99.5% of new hospitalizations from Covid-19 were people who had not received a shot. Four states, California, Florida, Missouri and Texas, were responsible for 46% of the new cases, with one in five coming in Florida. New cases of Covid-19 in the US, fueled by the highly transmissible Delta variant, have surged by 70% in a week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday, to more than 26,300 a day.Ĭases were rising in 48 states and stagnant in the other two, the CDC said. It’s so important people have the information they need about the vaccine … it is our fastest, most effective way out of this pandemic.” “I’m worried about what is to come because we are seeing increasing cases among the unvaccinated in particular. “The reality is that misinformation is still spreading like wildfire in our country aided and abetted by technology platforms,” he said on Fox News Sunday. Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general who has accused companies including Facebook of “ poisoning information” about coronavirus vaccines, said they were not doing enough to check the online proliferation of false claims. Joe Biden’s administration renewed its assault on social media companies spreading Covid-19 misinformation, as new infections continued to surge across the entire US.