Kudos to CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale for being the first (and so far, ONLY) journalist of his kind to throw a flag at President Biden for his blatantly false tweet at 5:45 pm on Thursday that there was "no vaccine available" when he took office. This was blatantly obvious to any journalist with a memory, but CNN alone discussed it. As Dale wrote:
Facts First: It's just not true that "there was no vaccine available" at the time Biden took office. About 3.5 million people were fully vaccinated against Covid-19 and about 19 million people had received at least one vaccine dose as of Biden's inauguration day on January 20, 2021, according to statistics published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The US was already administering an average of more than 1 million doses a day at the time. The first doses administered outside trials were given on December 14, 2020, while President Donald Trump was still in office. And Biden himself received his second dose nine days before he was sworn in.
There is a natural followup question here: Did CNN put this correction of Biden on the air? The answer is yes, Jake Tapper on The Lead pointed out the false tweet, and asked Dr. Anthony Fauci about it. Tapper professed amazement the lying tweet was still up, but Fauci displayed what a politician he is by saying "sorry, not my department."
So let's underline who hasn't touched Biden on this: fact checkers at AP, Reuters, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, Lead Stories, USA Today and The Washington Post (where Glenn Kessler was furious at anyone holding Biden accountable for baby formula distribution.)
Maybe they will catch up, as they should. Maybe they would offer the lame excuse that the Biden White House apologized. Again, from Dale:
The White House's Friday correction reads as follows: "We previously misstated that vaccines were unavailable in January 2021. We should have said that they were not widely available. Vaccines became available shortly before the President came into office. Since then, he's responsible for fully vaccinating over 200 million people." [Emphasis ours.]
When President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 12, 2022
In the last 15 months, the economy has created 8.3M jobs and the unemployment rate stands at 3.6% — the fastest decline in unemployment to start a President's term ever recorded.
Dale added that the economic lower half of this tweet was worth a quibble or two: he said it was fair for Biden to tout a decline in the unemployment rate during his tenure from 6.4 percent to 3.6 percent, but "the President's role in the improvement is the subject of debate. And though the tweet said that 'when President Biden took office, millions were unemployed,' there are still millions of people unemployed today" -- 5.9 million.
