the times laying out questions. what is the goal in the united states when it comes to covid? is it to have zero infections or to treat the virus like the seasonal flu? they argue the policy implications are different depending on the end goal. is it clear to you what the goal is or should be? yeah. first, i thought it was a fabulous op ed in the times yesterday. people should read it. they lay out fundamentally a set of questions that we as the american people have to answer. what are we trying to achieve? i think what we re trying to achieve, i think where most americans are is we want to get back to our lives in a way that doesn t overwhelm hospitals and cause 1,000 americans to die every day, and the good news is we have the tools. last year we kept thinking we had to wait until the cavalry arrives. there s no cavalry coming. we ve got the vaccines. and we ve got to make some tough decisions about how to get our lives back in order and do it in a way that s safe. we can. i though
fighting misinformation. you know, the thing from facebook was interesting because of course they say we put out good information but that doesn t mean they should have bad information. that statement was sort of strange to me. or many statements from facebook over the years. but i think one of the things that s difficult is that just because you are putting out good information doesn t mean the flood of misinformation doesn t overwhelm the good information. i think that s what s happening. and so, i think they probably tried to work together. but, you know, there s there s a big move against big tech right now, in washington and lots of other areas. and this idea of too much power and too much influence, which is what dr. fauci was talking about, i think, is is has been growing. and and they are seeing a lot of obstacles to getting people to do it and this is a big one. it s not the only one. there is people who there is stuff on cable news that s really irresponsible. there s
look. the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. and they re and they re killing people. it s an uphill battle to convince the unconvinced, as vaccination rates fall, and only about 8 48% of americans are fully vaccinated. case numbers are on the rise in every single state, and hospitalizations are up. in los angeles county, for example. every covid patient admitted to a department of health services hospital has one thing in common. they re not fully vaccinated. # it s evidence of what the data has been telling us, all along. the one thing standing in between relative health and severe illness is the vaccine. and i want to go, now, to cnn s joe jons, at the white house. joe, the white house is really hammering social-media companies right now over this vaccine information or misinformation, i should say. it s it s stunning to watch. that s for sure. you know, white house versus the media, sounds like a pretty familiar scenario, doesn t it?
to get people and convince people, like doing things, like olivia rodrigo and things like that to get people to take vaccinations. and at the same time, there s a flood of misinformation on social-media sites that people then reference. i actually did an interview, about two weeks ago, with ron klain, the chief of staff to the biden administration. and he zeroed in on it, very quickly. it s that whenever they ask people why they re not taking the vaccine, it s always, i saw it on facebook that it does. and then, there s a laundry list of things that the the vaccine does. some of them really outlandish. like, that bill gates is injecting metal into your body and then it sticks to your neck. there is all kinds of crazy stuff on there. and so, it makes it really difficult to convince people when they are seeing this in on what is, essentially, the way people get news, these days. or most people get news. #. i mean, here s the question i have. did the white house wait too long to con
so, yeah. absolutely. it s true. first, it was the first, it was the the surgeon general of the united states. then, it was the press secretary for the white house out on thursday and friday. then, the president, himself, weighing in with that very blunt language about lies killing people. and all of that tells you the white house is very much concerned about the direction that the numbers are going on covid, right now. and they re very concerned about the fact that there are lies out there, misinformation, conspiracy theories, frankly, that americans tend to buy into. and they ve bought into, for years and years. so, facebook, for its part, did decide to come out with a statement. essentially, saying, first, that they really weren t going to weigh in, if you will, on what joe biden said. simply because they say, as far as they re concerned, they put out a lot of facts.