Former Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that America has “more coronavirus cases than anywhere in the world,” ignoring China’s widely acknowledged undercounting of coronavirus cases and deaths.
Biden, who has repeatedly spread misinformation about the federal coronavirus response, criticized President Donald Trump in a statement released Thursday on Medium.
“Donald Trump is not responsible for the coronavirus, but he is responsible for failing to prepare our nation: for the months during which he continually neglected dire warnings from experts and downplayed the threat to us, and for the erratic and unacceptably slow federal response that has tragically lagged behind other countries,” Biden said.
“Now we have more coronavirus cases than anywhere in the world, and that is dealing body-blows to our economy and to the welfare and well-being of millions upon millions of Americans,” added Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
The Chinese government acknowledged Wednesday that it had been underreporting coronavirus cases by not counting asymptomatic carriers of the virus, confirming reporting that the country’s coronavirus numbers were artificially low. (RELATED: WHO Chief Won Election With China’s Help. Now He’s Running Interference For China On Coronavirus)
(Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Biden and his campaign have repeatedly spread coronavirus-related misinformation.
Biden was dinged by fact-checkers after he falsely accused Trump of cutting the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the Feb. 26 Democratic debate.
The former vice president falsely said that Trump rejected coronavirus tests from the World Health Organization. “The WHO never offered to sell test kits to the United States,” PolitiFact noted, ruling Biden’s accusation “false.”
Biden also spread the false claim that Trump referred to the virus as a “hoax” during a campaign rally in South Carolina. Biden on March 3 tweeted a video that misleadingly spliced together Trump saying “coronavirus” followed by, “this is their new hoax.”
We can’t sit by and lose this country to Donald Trump. Today, we take it back — together.
Go vote: https://t.co/Hy8C4n0lUk pic.twitter.com/0YgyJFr9YR
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 3, 2020
In reality, Trump said that Democrats’ political reaction to the virus was a “hoax.”
Biden’s campaign also produced a video accusing Trump of silencing a career CDC official who spoke out about the coronavirus, and then continued promoting the video even after fact-checkers debunked it.
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