THE FACTS: False information is circulating on social media around the Biden administration’s plan to drive up COVID-19 vaccination rates with a door-to-door campaign. Despite the delta variant of the coronavirus surging, only 48% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated and many parts of the country are lagging behind. “Now we need to go to community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and oftentimes, door-to-door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people” who need to be vaccinated, Biden said on July 6. Some posts online falsely claim the campaign would force vaccines on people while others suggest the Biden administration’s initiative has a hidden agenda that will lead to guns or Bibles being confiscated. “The Biden Administration wants to knock on your door to see if you’re vaccinated,” Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted. “What’s next? Knocking on your door to see if you own a gun?” North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn echoed such claims during the Conservative Political Action Conference last week. “Think about the mechanisms they would have to build to be able to actually execute that massive of a thing,” Cawthorn said. “They could then go door to door and take your guns. They could go door to door and take your Bibles.” But the vaccine campaign does not involve federal workers, it relies on local officials, private sector workers and volunteers to go into areas where there are lower vaccination rates and provide information on where to access the vaccine. Furthermore, federal law prohibits creating a national gun registry. White House press secretary Jen Psaki countered some of the false claims in a press conference on July 9. “This is grassroots volunteers, this is members of the clergy, these are volunteers who believe that people across the country, especially in low-vaccinated areas, should have accurate information, should have information about where they can get vaccinated, where they can save their own lives and their neighbors’ lives and their family members’ lives,” Psaki said. An example of this approach is playing out in North Carolina. “We are employing numerous outreach strategies – including door knocking – across the state to ensure that people have the information that they need about vaccinations and can easily and conveniently get vaccinated,” Bailey Pennington, a spokesperson with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, told The Associated Press in an email. The grassroots component of the U.S. vaccination campaign has been in operation since April and was funded by Congress in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill passed in March, the AP reported.
Knocking on doors to promote vaccines doesn’t violate health privacy law
CLAIM: President Joe Biden’s initiative for a door-to-door campaign to encourage vaccination for COVID-19 is a violation of the federal law that restricts the release of medical information.
THE FACTS: Biden pitched a door-knocking campaign as a way to get vaccine information and assistance to more people, not probe Americans about whether they have been vaccinated. But even if officials or volunteers did ask people that question, it wouldn’t be a violation of federal health privacy laws, according to experts. Nevertheless, social media users and political candidates have spread false claims that the campaign infringes on the federal health privacy law known as HIPAA. “How about the government stay the heck out of our business!?” Texas Republican congressional candidate Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez wrote in a Facebook post. “What ever happened to PRIVATE health decisions? Seems like giving these door knockers our vaccination status would a HIPPA violation.” Another Facebook user wrote, “Coming to my door to seek personal medical info is a violation of HIPAA laws & my constitutional rights.” In fact, HIPAA doesn’t block anyone from asking another person about their health status, according to Alan Meisel, law professor and bioethics expert at the University of Pittsburgh. “What it does is prohibit certain health care entities from revealing certain health information about patients,” Meisel told the AP in an email. If someone does come to your door to encourage you to get the COVID-19 vaccine, you have no obligation to tell them whether you have been vaccinated, said Kayte Spector-Bagdady, lawyer and associate director for the Center for Bioethics and Social Science in Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. “HIPAA does not apply to public health outreach volunteers, and it doesn’t apply to information you offer to tell,” Spector-Bagdady said in an email to the AP. “If you are uncomfortable, just don’t open the door – or do and just get some information without giving any in return!”
— Ali Swenson
Pennsylvania did not initiate an election audit
CLAIM: Pennsylvania initiated a full audit of the rigged November 2020 election.
THE FACTS: The state of Pennsylvania did not initiate an election audit. Last Wednesday, Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano said he was launching a “forensic investigation” and issued letters to officials in three counties, requesting sweeping elections-related information. The letters threatened counties with subpoenas if they don’t respond affirmatively by July’s end, according to reporting by The Associated Press. In the wake of Mastriano’s request, social media users took to Facebook and spread misinformation about the source and nature of the request, and about the integrity of Pennsylvania’s 2020 presidential elections. One popular social media post said, “Pennsylvania initiated a FULL audit of the RIGGED election.” But the state did not initiate an audit. “The state has not initiated anything,” said Wanda Murren, communications director at the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees the state’s election process. There is also no evidence that the election was improperly administered or poorly managed. Critics say an election audit is duplicative, given the legal requirements for each county and the state to review election results for accuracy and investigate any discrepancies. “Pennsylvania counties, despite a convergence of difficult circumstances, ran a free, fair and accurate election in 2020,” Murren said in a prepared statement last Wednesday. “The majority of Pennsylvanians – and Americans – are satisfied with that truth.”