The Guardian view on the US and vaccine disinformation: a stupid, shocking and deadly game

In July 2021, Joe Biden rightly inveighed against social media companies failing to tackle vaccine disinformation: "They're killing people," the US president said. Despite their pledges to take action, lies and sensationalised accounts were still spreading on platforms. Most of those dying in the US were unvaccinated. An additional source of frustration for the US was the fact that Russia and China were encouraging mistrust of western vaccines, questioning their efficacy, exaggerating side-effects and sensationalising the deaths of people who had been inoculated. How, then, would the US describe the effects of its own disinformation at the height of the…