The White House falsely claimed Thursday that there were no Covid-19 vaccines available when President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
“When President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available,” the official White House account tweeted.
In truth, the first vaccines were administered under the FDA’s emergency-use authorization in mid-December of 2020. They were developed under the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed”, a public-private partnership wherein the federal government invested billions of dollars into vaccine development and brokered a deal with pharmaceutical companies to purchase the vaccines once they were approved.
The White House’s false assertion is especially odd considering President Biden himself was fully vaccinated before being inaugurated on January 20, 2021. Biden received his first dose of the vaccine on December 21, 2020, and his second dose on January 13, 2020.
When Biden took office, nearly one million Americans were already being vaccinated daily. Biden said he wanted to get 100 million Americans vaccinated within 100 days, a goal that was actually deemed too modest by public health officials and the press.
The Washington Post‘s lead fact checker, Glenn Kessler, urged the White House to “delete this false tweet,” noting that 8 percent of seniors had taken the vaccine by the time Biden was sworn into office.
I reached out to the White House for comment Thursday evening to ask if they planned to correct their error, but have not received a response.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who celebrated her last day on Friday, previously promised to bring “truth” and “transparency” to the briefing room.
