During the debate Sunday night between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, we got to see first-hand why Joe Biden is not the person this country needs to handle a pandemic like the coronavirus outbreak. After trying to explain what he would do differently than Trump, Biden attempted to explain how things were handled better in the Obama-Biden administration. During his ramble, he seemed to lose concentration, mistakingly saying that the coronavirus pandemic occurred during the Obama-Biden administration. Even when he tried to correct himself, he got it wrong.
“We’ve been through this before with the coronavirus. We’ve been through this—I mean, excuse me, we’ve been through before, with uhhh … dealing with the viruses that… the N1H1 virus, as well as what happened in Africa.”
So, in the span of ten seconds, Biden confused the coronavirus with the swine flu (H1N1), botches coronavirus by calling it N1H1, and then, to top it off, he failed to remember the name of the Ebola virus.
Joe Biden gets confused… thinks the coronavirus outbreak happened under Obama… incorrectly calls the swine flu N1H1, forgets the name Ebola. #DemocraticDebate pic.twitter.com/mxRchAKdzf
— Matt Margolis 🇺🇸 (@mattmargolis) March 16, 2020
Biden continued, “We provided these hospitals dealing with these great pandemics, and we were able to do it quickly.”
He got a major detail wrong here. The Ebola virus outbreak of 2014-2016 was never classified by the World Health Organization as a pandemic.
Biden kept referring back to the Obama-Biden administration’s handling of past outbreaks, but those are records he can’t actually be proud of.
In 2009, then-Vice President Biden bungled the administration’s response to the H1NI virus pandemic, forcing the White House to do some serious damage control:
Joe Biden will again politicize coronavirus today. But his record on pandemics is one of incompetence.
During the 2009 swine flu outbreak, Biden made reckless comments unsupported by science & the experts.
The Obama Admin had to clean up his mess & apologize for his ineptitude. pic.twitter.com/5TCKZeShkz
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) March 12, 2020
Biden’s bungling even earned him criticism from fellow Democrat Sen. Tom Harkin, who blasted Biden for spreading “misinformation.”
While it was expected this debate would become an open forum for the candidates to trash the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Trump was actually doing something about it while the Democrats were busy impeaching him, and experts agree that Trump’s decisive actions early on saved lives.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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