(CNSNews.com) – White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that it does a “disservice” to people who might lose their lives to COVID-19 when people spread “inaccurate information” on the federal government’s efforts to send community groups and clergy door-to-door to provide information on vaccines.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster on Thursday rejected the government’s door-to-door vaccination campaign, calling on the state’s Board of Health and Environmental Control to “issue direction to agency leadership and to state and local healthcare organizations prohibiting the use of the Biden Administration’s ‘targeted’ ‘door to door’ tactics in the State’s ongoing vaccination efforts.”
“A South Carolinian’s decision to get vaccinated is a personal one for them to make and not the government’s,” McMaster said in a statement. “Enticing, coercing, intimidating, mandating, or pressuring anyone to take the vaccine is a bad policy which will deteriorate the public’s trust and confidence in the State’s vaccination efforts.”
He said that “the prospect of government vaccination teams showing up unannounced or unrequested at the door of ‘targeted’ homeowners or on their property will further deteriorate the public’s trust and could lead to potentially disastrous public safety consequences.”
When asked Friday to respond to McMaster and explain what is being done in the vaccination outreach, Psaki said, “Let me first say that the failure to provide accurate public health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the accessibility of them to people across the country, including the people of South Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider that.
“I would say that what this is and what it is not, this is not federal employees going door-to-door. This is grassroots volunteers. This is members of the clergy,” the press secretary said.
“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. That’s exactly what this is,” she said.
“It’s something that’s been going on since April, and it’s something where we’ve seen an impact in states where there are lower vaccination rates, so it is something that we will continue to work with local groups to do, and it’s a disservice to the country and to the people who may lose their lives, who may lose family members to provide inaccurate disinformation at a moment when we’re still fighting a pandemic,” Psaki added.