Biden on Corona

Date: 
Thursday, September 10, 2020

Tags:

Summary: 
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden was wrong when he said that the Trump administration made no effort to get U.S. medical experts into China as the novel coronavirus epidemic spread there early this year.
  • he was wrong to say the administration made “no effort” to get medical experts into China after the outbreak was reported.

     

Biden’s primary warning about the coronavirus came in a USA Today op-ed he published on Jan. 27, which was six days after the first coronavirus case in the United States was announced.

  • While Biden told Reid that he had “warned” Trump that “this pandemic was coming,” his January op-ed did not word it so definitively. In the op-ed, Biden referred to “the possibility of a pandemic” and he said one “will come sooner or later.”
  • His comment to Reid that he “talked about what we needed to do” as far back as January was more big picture than specific.
  • Beyond that, Biden did not offer much specificity for battling the coronavirus in January, when public-health officials around the world were just beginning to grasp the nature of the virus and the steps that would be required to contain it.
  • But while he spoke broadly in January about how the U.S. should approach the crisis, he did not offer a detailed plan until March 12, a day after the WHO declaration.
  • https://www.statesman.com/news/20200723/fact-check-did-joe-biden-issue-w...

    However, while Biden was clearly concerned about the virus based on those early remarks, there’s little to indicate he anticipated the need for the country to shut down before others—after all, his campaign didn’t start to cancel events until March 10, just one day before President Trump’s address from the Oval Office warning about the virus; six days before the White House issued guidelines encouraging remote working and schooling, avoiding large groups of people, and not going out to crowded public places; and only nine days before California became the first state to issue a mandatory stay-at-home order.    https://factcheck.thedispatch.com/p/was-joe-biden-warning-about-coronavirus