Facts matter: Biden exaggerated March 6 vaccine numbers

During a recent event with CEOs of health companies Johnson & Johnson and Merck, President Joe Biden touted the success his administration has had with getting Americans vaccinated.

"On Saturday, we hit a record of 2.9 million vaccinations in one day in America," the president said in a March 10 speech at the White House.

Special adviser to the White House virus task force Andy Slavitt led off a briefing with a similar claim: "On Saturday, we set an all-time, single-day record: nearly 3 million Americans vaccinated - a pace seen nowhere else in the world."

Those numbers sound great, but they're not accurate, according to The Associated Press.

On Saturday, March 6, only 1.56 million doses of the vaccine were administered. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported 2.9 million doses were given on that day, but that number, used by Biden, was actually for multiple days of vaccinations. The record day for vaccinations is Feb. 26 when 2.8 million doses were dispensed, the AP said.

Biden didn't destroy jobs

Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy from California recently tweeted a claim that Democrats, in just two months, have been responsible for "1 million energy jobs destroyed."

McCarthy made the same assertion on Fox News, stating, "(President Joe Biden has) eliminated almost a million jobs in the energy sector."

But this claim is wrong, according to PolitiFact.com.

It appears McCarthy got the number from a September study by the American Petroleum Institute that predicted nearly 1 million jobs would be lost by 2022 due to a total ban of oil and gas leasing.

Although Biden has stopped new leasing and drilling on federally controlled land, the work on previously leased sites continues. And there are more than 7,000 approved permits for drilling that haven't been used yet and are unaffected by the ban.

The study, citing a decline in the national economy, was referring to a loss of 1 million jobs overall, not just energy jobs. And the study notes that these are predictions of what could happen, not necessarily what will happen. McCarthy offered the job losses as having already happened since Biden took office.

There have been almost 120,000 jobs lost in the oil, gas and coal industries due to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, PolitiFact said. But that happened on President Donald Trump's watch, before Biden was inaugurated.

Checks are for citizens

The $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, recently passed by Congress and signed by Biden, will provide $1,400 checks to many Americans.

During the discussion of the stimulus package in the Senate, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas asked if it was fair for undocumented immigrants to receive a check. Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois responded by calling Cruz's question "just plain false."

Since then, social media users have echoed Cruz.

But this claim, as Durbin said, is false, according to USA Today.

The package states that payments will go to U.S. citizens and doesn't allow for most undocumented immigrants to get a stimulus check. It's the same as the relief package issued by Trump.

"For the most part, no unauthorized immigrants will receive the $1,400 stimulus payments," senior policy analyst Julia Gelatt told The Associated Press. "In order to receive a payment, someone must have a valid Social Security number issued by the Social Security Administration."

However, non-U.S. citizens who work at the Department of Homeland Security and those in the U.S. on a working-class visa are issued a Social Security number. They could be eligible for a stimulus check, even if they overstayed their visas.

When a Social Security number is issued to an eligible person, it remains valid, Social Security Administration spokesperson Dorothy Clark told CNN.

Nixon not Gerber baby

A false claim that frequently makes the rounds on social media has President Richard Nixon as the inspiration for the original Gerber baby, according to Snopes.com.

In 1928, Fremont Canning Co. owner Dan Gerber sponsored a contest to find the face for packaging on his Gerber baby food. The winner was artist Dorothy Hope Smith's charcoal sketch of a baby, whose identity was revealed 40 years later. It was a drawing of mystery novelist and retired English teacher Ann Turner Cook.

Nixon, born in 1913, was 15 years old when the contest took place.

Snopes said the Nixon reference appears to date back to an episode of the animated series "Futurama."

In a November 2000 episode, military leader Zapp Brannigan, voiced by Billy West, addresses a group of new recruits.

"Now to present the logistics of our mission, the commander-in-chief, please welcome the original Gerber baby, Earth President Richard M. Nixon," Brannigan says.

• Bob Oswald is a veteran Chicago-area journalist and former news editor of the Elgin Courier-News. Contact him at boboswald33@gmail.com.