US President Joe Biden urged Americans on Monday to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, insisting that the economy is entirely dependent on getting the pandemic under control. “So please, please get vaccinated. Get vaccinated now.”
The vaccination drive in the US started to lag as the country is confronted with an ever-growing surplus of coronavirus vaccine and looming expiration dates while countries in the developing world are in dire need of more vaccine doses to counter a rise in infections.
The US had been inoculating 870,000 individuals every day at the beginning of June, marking a sharp decline from the 3.3 million a day on average vaccinations it did in mid-April, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
States have tried to deal with vaccine hesitancy through million-dollar prizes, hunting rifles, marijuana, and free beer but states like Oklahoma, Tennessee, and North Carolina are showing signs of reducing vaccine demands. Oklahoma has not asked for new doses from the federal government for more than a month. Tennessee and North Carolina both have vaccinated less than half of their population, reported Associated Press.
Biden had set a goal to administer at least one dose of the vaccine to 70% of the adults in the country by July 4, but it remained unfulfilled. The President had accused social media giants of peddling vaccine misinformation and “killing people” by allowing the posts to circulate. Facebook fired back after Biden’s remarks on Friday, declaring that the accusation was “not supported by facts”. “Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed,” the company’s vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, said in a blog post.
The President attempted to smooth things over on Monday, asking the social media giant to not take things personally and to do something about the vaccine misinformation available on its site. “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,” Biden said during a press briefing. “The outrageous misinformation about the vaccine, that’s what I meant.” he added.
