President-elect Joe Biden's transition team blocked the chat for reporters during a Zoom conference, where journalists had been pressing officials to answer additional questions, Fox News reported.
As Politico's White House editor Sam Stein noted, the chat function wasn’t available during transition zoom calls, when reporters started to urge officials to take more questions.
Journalists on the video call were forced to raise their hands when they wanted to ask a question. After the Zoom session, where the transition team answered only five questions, Stein and other reporters demanded to make sessions more frequent or longer, as a significant number of questions were ignored.
The Biden transition team appears to have disabled the public chat function on its transition zoom calls, a place where I and others had been routinely complaining to them to take more questions.
— Sam Stein (@samstein) December 30, 2020
To date, the US has the world's highest coronavirus rates, according to Johns Hopkins University data tracking. The total number of people infected with coronavirus throughout the country has passed the 19.7 million mark and 342,312 coronavirus-related deaths has been registered since the pandemic began. For comparison's sake, the US armed forces witnessed 291,557 battle deaths during World War II, Business Insider cited the US Department of Veterans Affairs as saying.
