The White House is claiming there was no COVID vaccine available when President Joe Biden took office, a brazen falsehood designed to give Biden more credit than he deserves since he can’t defend his own record.

The White House claimed that “when President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available” while boasting about the jobs created under his presidency and the decline in the unemployment rate. Biden has wanted credit for job growth and used misleading metrics to try and win it. Now, the administration is using a straight-up falsehood about vaccines.

There was a vaccine available when Biden took office. If anyone should know this, it’s Biden, who received his second dose of the vaccine a week before he was inaugurated. Biden famously pledged an “incredible goal” of administering 100 million shots in the first 100 days of his presidency, even though the country was on pace to reach that goal before he was inaugurated. On the day Biden was sworn into office, more than 1.6 million shots were administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The White House is attempting to take credit for job numbers by claiming that Biden (and not Operation Warp Speed under the Trump administration) was responsible for the vaccine and for a return to normal. This is also meant to help Biden’s claim that he created “more jobs in one year than ever before in the history of America,” as he said during the State of the Union earlier this year.

But Biden did not create a record number of jobs. He simply happened to become president after the end of lockdowns across the country that had thrown millions of people out of work. The vast majority of the 8.3 million jobs Biden is bragging about were not created, and certainly not by Biden. They were a return to pre-pandemic, pre-lockdown numbers. Indeed, the 3.6% unemployment rate Biden is boasting about is exactly the same as the unemployment rate under then-President Donald Trump in January 2020.

Biden’s tenure has been a mess, as inflation and the Democratic Party’s incompetence are sinking his administration and the party’s chances to maintain control of Congress in the midterm elections. He is floundering because he has no real accomplishments, and voters recognize and reject deceptive spin and outright falsehoods.