you. craig melvin here. quote, an extraordinary bit of progress. that is how we just heard president biden react to november s jobs numbers. numbers that did fall below some economist s expectations. we learned just this morning that the united states added some 210,000 jobs in november. economists, some of them expecting that number to be around 500,000. the unemployment rate did tick down to 4 .2%. the president striking this optimistic tone just moments ago. we re looking at the sharpest one-year decline in unemployment ever. simply put, america, america is back to work. and our jobs recovery is going very strong. looming over our economic recovery, of course, new fears about that fast-spreading omicron variant. cases now detected in five states. minnesota, colorado, hawaii,
of points as he acknowledges a poor jobs report and then went into the vaccines and i just want to fact check a couple of things. one, he did give president trump for the first time that i remember, credit for research on the vaccines. but essentially said that former president trump didn t deliver on the logistics. fact, when president trump left office just last january, north of 700,000 people a day were being vaccinated in this country. that s logistically delivering. did we want it to be more at that time through the sciences and the doctors? we were being told yes much more. he promised to do much more. you also heard president biden saying that america is back to work and the jobs recovery is going very strong. look, we see the people, we see all of you. we are actually watching and all personally experiencing truthfully what is happening
that they don t always get around to responding to those surveys in time. that s why those numbers didn t get adjusted next month and the month after that. what we re seeing throughout 2021 is that the early surveys tended to be more pessimistic than the latest surveys, suggesting there s ranl chance this will get revised up enough, not enough to turn moderate news into great news but perhaps into moderately better news. america does keep adding jobs, but we re still not back to normal . we re down compared to february of 2020, prepandemic. president biden says americans are back to work and our jobs recovery is going very strong. is that how you would characterize it? i think it s two very different stories going on out there right now. one, we are 3 1/2 million jobs below where we were at the start of the pandemic. normally an economy creates jobs. if we kept going at the previous trend we would have 5 or 6
4.2%. at this point in the year we re looking at the sharpest one-year decline in unemployment ever. simply point, america is back to work. our jobs recovery is going very strong. all told, in the first ten full months of my administration, the economy has created 6 million jobs, a record for a new president. reporter: to some degree it s kind of the perfect window into for everything the administration can point to that s going well in the economy, whether it s wage gains, whether it s overall growth, whether it s job gains, consistently over the course of the 11 months, seems to be always something on the downside. on a macro level, inflation at a three-decade high, energy prices have been high for months at this point in time. it is the reality of an economy coming out of a once in a century pandemic and it s also a reality of an economy that s still dealing with a persistent pandemic, and one that is now gotten a little cloudier as everybody waits to find out what
today. he instead focused on the positive, yet employment dropped more than expected down to 4.2%, wages were also up, although by less than last month. labor force participation also rose, to 61.8%. the incredible news of our unemployment rate has fallen to 4.2%. at this point in the year, we are looking at the sharpest one year decline in unemployment ever. simply put, america, america is back to work. our jobs recovery is going very strong. the tally used to calculate the number of new jobs is different from the self recorded household survey that produces the overall unemployment rate. highlight some key differences in the surveys. the jobs numbers have often been revised upwards multiple times this year, but the big concern for some, is that this job growth stumble came even before the omicron variant emerge. hitting industries with travel restrictions and lockdowns earlier in the pandemic,