The White House acknowledged Monday that people who had three shots of the coronavirus vaccine could still catch the virus.
“I had been triple-vaxxed, I had minor symptoms,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during the daily press briefing, recalling her experience with the virus to Fox News reporter Peter Doocy.
Doocy reported that he also caught the virus, despite being triple-vaccinated, asking Psaki why President Joe Biden continued to call the coronavirus pandemic “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Psaki defended Biden’s slogan by noting the coronavirus symptoms among the vaccinated were less severe compared to the unvaccinated.
“Those are significant serious statistics,” she said, calling the health impact on unvaccinated Americans “far more dire.”
Psaki said the White House and Biden always acknowledged that “breakthrough cases” would occur among the vaccinated.
“I think our president has said, as have we a number of times, that there will be breakthrough cases, there will be people who get COVID,” Psaki said.
White House officials argued for months that getting the vaccine would stop the virus and prevent it from spreading across the country.
Biden himself made the claim in December that vaccinated Americans would not spread the virus — even as it was obvious that variants of the virus continued to infect the vaccinated.
“Everybody talks about freedom, about not to have a shot or have a test,” Biden said during an interview. “Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about you make sure you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anybody else? What about that? What’s the big deal?”