White House issues correction after claiming ‘there was no vaccine available’ when President Biden took office

The official White House Twitter account posted incorrect COVID-19 information on Thursday, falsely claiming there was “no vaccine available” when President Biden took office in January 2021.

“When President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available,” the verified account tweeted to its 7 million followers Thursday. “In the last 15 months, the economy has created 8.3 [million] jobs and the unemployment rate stands at 3.6%, the fastest decline in unemployment to start a President’s term ever recorded.”

Critics quickly hit out at the tweet. “No vaccine available? What was president-elect Biden injected with? Sugar water?” one person said. “And [it] was his *second* shot! Maybe check your own tweets?”

“Who’s manning the @WhiteHouse Twitter account? Delete this false tweet,” implored Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer of the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column. “Biden himself has said 8% of seniors had gotten the vaccine on the day he took office. Biden was one of them.”

On Friday afternoon, about four hours after the publication of the initial version of this fact check, the White House acknowledged on Twitter that the Thursday tweet was inaccurate.

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.”

Biden received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which obtained emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under Trump administration on December 11th, 2020. Moderna’s vaccine was authorized for emergency use on December 18th, 2020.

The White House tweeted on January 14, 2021: “President-elect Biden received his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine because he trusts scientists. Our administration is committed to doing everything possible to ensure every American has all the information they need to get vaccinated.”