Popular Facebook Post Distorts San Francisco Policy On Minors Getting COVID-19 Vaccine
Thursday, July 8, 2021
| Sacramento, CA
If your time is short:
- Misleading posts on Facebook and Twitter say minors in San Francisco are consenting to COVID-19 vaccines without their parent’s permission. San Francisco issued a health order allowing emancipated minors and those considered “self-sufficient” to consent to receive the Pfizer vaccine.
- San Francisco issued further guidance for healthcare providers administering COVID-19 vaccines to minors. The guidance says healthcare providers are required to do everything possible to get the consent from a parent or legal guardian before giving a vaccine.
Since the Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine for emergency use for minors ages 12 and above, more people have begun to get their first dose. In California, more than half of the population has received their first dose of the vaccine against COVID-19. In San Francisco, it’s 82%.
But with the news of more people eligible to get vaccinated comes more misinformation about the shots.
Two weeks after the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use for the new age group, a Facebook post claimed minors in San Francisco could get vaccinated against COVID-19 without their parents consent. That post went viral, garnering over 10,000 shares, comments and reactions combined on Facebook.
A post from The Hodgetwins, a conservative commentary duo, was flagged on May 27 as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
In bold letters, the post reads “San Francisco Allowing Children to ‘Consent’ to Covid Vaccine Without Parents Approval.”
At the bottom of the post is a snippet from a San Francisco County health order that attempts to justify the claim that minors are receiving vaccines without parental consent. However, the Facebook post and others on Twitter fail to point out the health order was intended for emancipated California minors or those who can prove they are self-sufficiently independent.
As a way to make COVID-19 vaccines more accessible, San Francisco’s Department of Public Health said the health order was issued in anticipation of the FDA’s decision to administer Pfizer vaccines to the newly eligible group.
A few weeks later, SFDPH issued further guidance for city and county healthcare providers administering vaccines to minors at mass vaccination spots. The guidance said because emancipated and self-sufficient minors “are not the norm and thus relatively uncommon,” they can consent to medical care without a parent or legal guardian’s approval.
The guidance also says, San Francisco-affiliated vaccination providers should “reasonably attempt to ascertain a minor’s claim of self-sufficient or emancipated status” such as signed documentation. A minor is considered “self-sufficient” if they are at least 15 years old, manage their finances, and live separately from their parents.
If a minor is not emancipated or considered self-sufficient “healthcare providers must reasonably attempt to notify a parent or guardian to consent to medical care for that minor and allow that person the opportunity to object to administration of that [vaccine],” according to the guidance.
Even with the health order, it’s not as easy for minors to consent to the vaccine on their own behalf. In an email, SFDPH said “generally, parent or legal guardian consent is required for COVID-19 vaccinations of minors.” California’s Department of Public Health said the same and lists acceptable forms of consent for “persons younger than 18-years” such as being accompanied by a parent or legal guardian, a signed consent form prior to the appointment, or some kind of verbal consent via telephone.
Medical experts agree that vaccinating minors was always part of the vaccine rollout plan, but knowing a person’s medical history is also just as important. Specifically for emancipated minors consenting on their own behalf. “There’s some gray zones here where it’s not easy to make these decisions,” said Lee Riley, a Professor of infectious disease at UC Berkeley.
One of those gray zones is myocarditis. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an increased number of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, in adolescents after their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. However, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices concluded that the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine to individual persons outweigh the risks of myocarditis.
Because of this, Riley agrees that healthcare providers administering the vaccine to minors should do everything they can to understand the minor’s medical history.
In regards to vaccine side effects, “the story is not completely done with children and safety and we have to watch this and do no harm,” said Monica Gandhi, an American physician and Professor of Medicine at University of California in San Francisco.
Gandhi says because of a lack of CDC data on vaccine side effects in children, healthcare providers administering vaccines should be extra careful.
Our Ruling:
Social media posts claimed that minors can get vaccinated without their parent’s consent in San Francisco. The county’s department of public health issued a health order in anticipation of the FDA’s approval of the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use for emancipated or “self-sufficient” minors who are 12 years old and above.
Weeks after the health order, SFDPH said the exemption for minors to consent without their parent’s approval “are not the norm and thus relatively uncommon.”
Medical experts agree with the city and county of San Francisco that healthcare providers must do everything possible to get consent from a parent or legal guardian prior to administering a vaccine to a minor.
We rate this claim as Mostly False.
Sources:
Twitter post, May 25, 2021
Facebook post, May 27, 2021
Interview with Dr. Lee Riley, June 1, 2021
Interview with Dr. Monica Gandhi, June 3, 2021
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Myocarditis and Pericarditis after Receipt of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Among Adolescents and Young Adults, May 28, 2021
The Atlantic, Doctors Are Puzzled by Heart Inflammation in the Young and Vaccinated, July 1, 2021
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Use of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine After Reports of Myocarditis Among Vaccine Recipients, July 6, 2021
Los Angeles Times, Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations in California, July 7, 2021
City and County of San Francisco Vaccine Dashboard, July 7, 2021
San Francisco Health Order allowing minors to consent to vaccines, April 28, 2021
Guidance for City and County of San Francisco (CCSF) Healthcare Providers Administering COVID-19 Vaccines to Minor Patients, May 17, 2021
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Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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