FLASHBACK: Dr. Birx's Early Prediction for COVID-19 Deaths Destroys Biden Narrative

Former Vice President Biden has spent the last several months politicizing COVID-19 in the hopes of scaring people into voting for him, arguing that “it didn’t have to be this way” and claiming he’d do a better job, even though he hasn’t suggested doing anything beyond what has already been done. In fact, he’s often plagiarized Trump’s COVID-19 response and claimed it to be his own.

But, I digress.

Back in March, Dr. Deborah Birx, one of the experts advising President Trump, predicted that “if we do things almost perfectly,” there would be up to 200,000 deaths in the United States.

“If we do things together well, almost perfectly, we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities,” Birx told Savannah Guthrie on Today.

Of course, things weren’t perfect, thanks largely to New York and New Jersey, the states with the worst responses to COVID-19 in the country, and the worst in the world—particularly New York. Roughly 22 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States come from New York and Jersey.

The fact is that a small number of poorly managed states skew America’s COVID-19 death numbers significantly.

For example, if you take the COVID-19 death counts of the top four states per capita (New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut), they account for 28 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the country.

That’s an incredibly high concentration of deaths in just four states. Yet despite these states’ disproportionately bad responses to the pandemic, the United States is basically where Dr. Birx said we’d be if things had been done almost perfectly.

So when Joe Biden says he would have done better, how exactly? Would Biden have stopped Cuomo’s deadly nursing home policy in New York? There’s no reason to believe that any state would have done anything differently under Biden.

In fact, Joe Biden would have done worse, as it took him months to flip-flop on the China travel ban, which experts agree saved thousands and thousands of lives.

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Matt Margolis is the author of the new book Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis