The White House, on May 13, corrected its inaccurate tweet about the availability of vaccines in January 2021 but refused to delete it, saying that vaccines “were not widely available. “
The White House’s official Twitter account posted the claim on May 13, writing that “when President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available.”
Hours after posting the tweet, the White House admitted its mistake, and said “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,” the update reads.
However, the original post was not deleted, and users cannot see the correction unless they go to the account’s timelines. The post hasn’t been flagged by Twitter to indicate that it contains false information. Even though experts recommend the deletion of fallacious posts when issuing corrections so the information does not continue to spread.
At the time President Biden took office, two of the six vaccines approved by the World Health Organization were approved in the US by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They were the vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.