• e-mail

Facebook is blasting back against President Biden after he accused the company of 'killing people' by allowing misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine to circulate on its platform.

On Friday, a Facebook official scathingly told NBC: 'In private exchanges the Surgeon General [Vivek Murthy] has praised our work, including our efforts to inform people about COVID-19... The White House is looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals.'

The Biden Administration hoped to have 70 percent of American adults partially vaccinated against COVID by Independence Day - a goal they missed by 3 percent. 

The Commander-in-chief has voiced his frustration about vaccine misinformation proliferating on social media, saying it is stopping millions of Americans from getting the jab. 

Earlier this week, the White House confirmed it had stepped up COVID-19 misinformation tracking as it tried to tackle slowing rates of vaccination. 

Press Secretary Jen Psaki explicitly singled out Facebook saying that influential anti-vaxxers 'remain active' on the site 'despite some even being banned on other platforms'.

'You shouldn't be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation,' she stated on Thursday. 

The following day, President Biden was asked he had a message for Facebook, to which he responded: 'They're killing people. I mean it really. Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people.'

Facebook is blasting back against President Biden after he accused the company of 'killing people' by allowing misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine to circulate on its platform

President Biden claimed the company was 'killing people'  because it was not properly monitoring or removing misleading posts about the COVID-19 shots

But Facebook is not letting Biden control the narrative, pushing back in a series of statements shared with NBC. 

'We will not be distracted by accusations which aren't supported by the facts,' a spokesperson declared. 

'The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet. More than 3.3 million Americans have also used our vaccine finder tool to find out where and how to get a vaccine. The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives. Period.'

A Facebook official then added the scathing claim that Biden was simply looking for scapegoats to explain why he failed to meet his goal to have 70 percent of the country vaccinated.  

Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, was asked repeatedly about how the White House could justify flagging social media posts about COVID-19 to Facebook

On Friday, White House press Jen Psaki was quizzed repeatedly about the practice of flagging posts.

Fox News' Peter Doocy asked: 'For how long has the administration been spying on people's Facebook profiles looking for vaccine misinformation?' 

'That was quite a loaded and inaccurate question,' responded Psaki, insisting that the White House had similar conversations with news companies to keep the record straight.

The row erupted as officials react to a rise in COVID-19- cases, hospitalizations and deaths across the U.S. 

The U.S. recorded 28,412 new cases on Thursday as the numbers tick back upward in what CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said was a 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' 

Nearly every state and the District of Columbia have seen infections rise in the last week 

Fox News' Peter Doocy accused the administration of spying on people's Facebook profiles, one of series of tough questions in a noisy briefing room on Friday

The most recent seven-day average of new cases was 26,300, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a jump of almost 70 percent. 

The cases are concentrated among people who have not been vaccinated, triggering a fresh push to ensure that accurate information is available.

'Our point is that there is information that is leading to people not taking the vaccine and people are dying as a result. We have a responsibility as a public health matter to raise that issue,' said Psaki. 

And she  insisted the social media platforms were free to do as they pleased with the information supplied by the administration.

'We don't take anything down,' she said. 'We don't block anything. 

'Facebook, and any private sector company, makes decisions about what information should be on their platform.'

The danger was too big to ignore, she said. 

'It is life and death,' she said. 'It is a public health issue.'

But she also took a dig at social media companies, suggesting they should be doing more.  

'Obviously there are steps they have taken. They're a private sector company,' she said. 

'There are additional steps they can take. It's clear that there are more that can be taken.' 

She faced repeated questions about how the administration could be sure that today's facts are not tomorrows falsehoods and vice versa. Journalists cited the example of how statements linking the coronavirus to a lab leak had once been flagged as misinformation, but were now being reevaluated.

The contentious briefing followed the announcement a day earlier that the Biden administration had been flagging problematic posts. 

'We are in regular touch with the social media platforms and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff and also members of our COVID-19 team — given as [Surgeon General Vivek] Murthy conveyed this is a big issue, of misinformation, specifically on the pandemic,' Psaki said on Thursday.

The admission triggered Republican condemnation.  

Sen. Josh Hawley accused the White House of imposing a COVID speech code. 

'I think it's really scary to have the federal government of the United States, the White House, compiling lists of people, organizations, whatever, and then going to a private company that, by the way, is a monopoly, Facebook, and saying, 'You need to censor. You need to do something about this.'' he told Fox News. 

Journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote a long Twitter thread condemning the practice. 

'If you don't find it deeply disturbing that the White House is 'flagging' internet content that they deem 'problematic' to their Facebook allies for removal, then you are definitionally [sic] an authoritarian.'

But the impact of unvaccinated populations were spelled during the White House COVID-19 briefing on Friday, which revealed the surge in cases.

'We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination rates because unvaccinated people are at risk,' said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who called it a 'pandemic of the unvaccinated.'

The result, she added, was likely to be deaths that could have been prevented. 

'The good news is that if you are fully vaccinated, you are protected against COVID hospitalization and death and are even protected against the known variants, including the Delta variant circulating in this country,' she said. 

'If you are not vaccinated, you remain at risk.'