When asked about social media’s role in U.S. COVID-19 vaccination rates, Biden blamed Facebook for spreading vaccine misinformation to millions of unvaccinated Americans: “They’re killing people.”

Facebook refuted the president’s remark by noting that the social media platform has been more effective at convincing Americans to get vaccinated than the federal government.

Data from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland shows that two billion people worldwide have viewed information on Facebook about how the vaccine saves lives. Over three million Americans have used the vaccine finder tool on Facebook to help locate and get transportation to a vaccine site.

The data also revealed that nearly 85 percent of Facebook users either have been or want to be vaccinated against COVID-19. That compares to President Biden’s missed goal of 70 percent of Americans to be vaccinated by the Fourth of July. 

This data objectively shows that Facebook is outperforming the Biden administration’s efforts to convince Americans to get protection against the virus. Biden’s meetings with Facebook over the past month have been heated as cases of the virus have been steadily rising in the United States since the beginning of the summer.

This has resulted in a significant increase in hospitalizations and deaths compared to May when it seemed like the pandemic would soon come to an end. The new Delta variant, which is much more easily transmissible than the Alpha variant, and the millions of people who are still unvaccinated have contributed to this new uptick. 

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has defended the president’s comments by repeating the claim that Facebook is literally killing people by allowing influential public figures to steer people away from getting the vaccine.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s response was much more appropriate than Psaki’s. Murthy believes people need to realize that the influential public figures with the most followers are not always trustworthy and that the most trustworthy information sometimes comes from people with low name recognition.

The Biden administration needs to stop placing blame on platforms like Facebook for vaccine misinformation and instead focus on gaining trust from those who are still unvaccinated. The solution to ending the pandemic is the vaccine, and that message needs to clearly conveyed by the White House instead of allowing the CDC to confuse and frustrate people who have done their part to end the pandemic by wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Virtually all new COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are among unvaccinated people.

The bottom line is that people need to do their own research and draw their own conclusions for their own health decisions. In the United States, people are free to make their own health decisions and also face the consequences for those decisions.