Viral lies

President Biden hit a nerve Friday when he said social media platforms are “killing people” by helping spread anti-COVID-vaccine propaganda. Monday, the president elaborated, citing a nonprofit study documenting that two-thirds of anti-vax misinformation on Facebook or Twitter tracks back to just a dozen user accounts.

Some conservatives call Biden an autocrat for urging action against dangerous purveyors of disinformation. But it’s exactly his job if he cares about protecting Americans when shot-getting momentum has stalled and the delta COVID-19 variant is everywhere.

One of the 12 top poisoners of public health the president referred to is New York’s own Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crusader against child vaccination for measles and other scourges (even though he had his own children vaccinated). RFK Jr.’s nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, produced and is distributing a devious documentary called “Medical Racism” that retells America’s dark history of medical experimentation on vulnerable groups and cynically connects it to the push to get as many people as possible protected from COVID-19.

The fact that Blacks are three times as likely to be hospitalized with the virus and twice as likely to die from its ravages compared to non-Hispanic whites doesn’t trouble Kennedy or his group. What rankles it instead are the vaccines’ exceedingly rare side effects. Of 334 million doses administered, 6,079 shot-recipient deaths have been reported, 0.0018% of the total. (Nor does correlation imply causation; the CDC reports that “review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records, has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines.”) Compare that to more than 90,000 Black Americans dead from COVID.

Facebook and Twitter are within their legal rights to let anti-vaxxers stay on their platforms, but companies that boast about their public health bona fides — Facebook says it has removed 18 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation — make fools of themselves when they let an industrial-strength conspiracy theorist target the very people at greatest risk with sophisticated and pernicious propaganda.