As the winter season brings a sickness surge, the Biden administration is back to blathering about the supposed efficacy of the coronavirus vaccine, with one of its top doctors claiming "nearly every" COVID-19 death is preventable with vaccination.
CLAIM: The White House's COVID-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha claimed at Thursday's press conference, "We know we can prevent nearly every death from COVID if people get their updated vaccines [...] So, we continue to press that message."
While outlining President Joe Biden's "COVID-19 Winter Preparedness Plan," Jha seized the opportunity to push booster shots on the American public. "The most important thing Americans can do is to go get their updated COVID-19 vaccine right away..." Jha stated. "The updated COVID-19 vaccine is your best protection against the version of COVID we’re fighting right now."
FACTS: The White House's "message" is countered by data analysis conducted for the Washington Post's The Health 202, which revealed that 58 percent of COVID-19 fatalities were vaccinated or boosted patients in August. "We can no longer say this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated," Kaiser Family Foundation vice president Cynthia Cox, who conducted the analysis, told The Post.
As Katie covered, the new statistics on COVID-19 deaths debunked the White House's narrative on the vaccine. In late November, when the WaPo report was released, Jha had just made the same claim a day earlier that "if folks get their updated vaccines and they get treated if they have a breakthrough infection, we can prevent essentially every COVID death in America."
Although the findings marked the first time that a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus had received at least the primary series of the vaccine, it continued an eye-opening pattern where we saw the vaxxed population make up 23 percent of 'Rona deaths in September 2021, and then up to 42 percent of the COVID-19 death toll in January and February of this year.
RATING: The claim that keeping up-to-date with coronavirus vaccinations can "prevent nearly every death from COVID" is FALSE. Even though the president has proclaimed we're facing a so-called "pandemic of the unvaccinated" and threatened that unvaxxed Americans alone would suffer "a winter of severe illness and death," Biden's alarmist language isn't backed by real-world numbers.