Fauci: Smallpox would have there with today’s ‘false information’

US President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, has said that he thinks smallpox and polio would still be spreading in the United States if today’s “false information” was there then.

“If you look at the extraordinary historic success in eradicating smallpox and eliminating polio from most of the world, and we’re on the brink of eradicating polio, if we had the pushback for vaccines, the way we’re seeing on certain media, I don’t think it would have been possible at all to not only eradicate smallpox, we probably would still have smallpox and we probably would still have polio in this country,” Fauci told CNN on Saturday.

“If we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now if we had that back decades ago, I would be certain that we’d still have polio in this country,” he added.

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on Thursday describing health misinformation as an “urgent threat”.

Murthy blamed “health misinformation” on social media for vaccine hesitancy despite vaccinations being widely available, and called for a whole-of-society effort to combat the misinformation problem.

“Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment with little accountability to their users,” Murthy told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “They’ve allowed people who intentionally spread misinformation — what we call ‘disinformation’ — to have extraordinary reach.”

Murthy’s comments come as concerns over the coronavirus pandemic have risen in recent weeks, especially with the more contagious delta variant spreading rapidly throughout the United States.

Biden said on Friday that American social media companies, such as Facebook, that allow coronavirus misinformation to spread on their platforms are “killing people.”

Biden was asked during a press conference at the White House what his message is to social media platforms on the spread of inaccurate information about COVID-19 vaccines.

“They’re killing people. The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people,” the US president said.

The Biden administration’s push to combat disinformation comes as the vaccination rate has slowed across the United States and the more contagious delta variant has spread among unvaccinated people.

The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, warned on Friday that COVID-19 is “becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

“We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk,” Walensky told reporters.