A national emergency, you know, worldwide alerts. You know, we have right now a crisis with the coronavirus, emanating from China. 31: America needs a president they can trust, especially at times of a crisis. That same day, at a campaign event in Fort Madison, Iowa, Biden said, “W e have right now a crisis with the coronavirus,” and warned that Trump was not a leader up to the challenge.īiden, Jan. But there were exceptions for permanent residents and the immediate family members of both U.S. citizens who have traveled to China within the last two weeks from entering the U.S. 31, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency for the novel coronavirus and announced travel restrictions to and from China, effective Feb. “But it takes a lot of work.”įour days after Biden’s op-ed, on Jan.
We can keep it from being a pandemic,” Biden said at a a campaign rally on Feb. He said it was a “possibility.” He said Trump was not prepared to lead the country through a “global health challenge,” which Biden did predict would “get worse before it gets better.” (The World Health Organization didn’t declare COVID-19 a pandemic until March 11.) In fact, a month after that op-ed, Biden still said it wasn’t yet a pandemic. How many more people would be alive?”īut as we’ve written, Biden didn’t say in the op-ed that the outbreak was already a pandemic. Imagine had he at the State of the Union stood up and said, when back in January, I wrote an article for USA Today saying, we’ve got a pandemic. Trump “knew the detail of it,” Biden said. 7 acknowledging the coronavirus was “deadly stuff,” adding that it might be five times more lethal than the flu. We’ve got a real problem.”īiden was responding to recently revealed comments Trump made to Woodward on Feb. But Biden went too far with comments at the CNN town hall when he said he warned in the op-ed, “We’ve got a pandemic. That puts Biden on record as sounding an early warning about the coronavirus. at that time, “There will likely be more.”īiden argued that “Trump’s demonstrated failures of judgment and his repeated rejection of science make him the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health challenge.” Biden touted the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak, and he criticized Trump for proposing budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for International Development (although Congress did not enact those proposed cuts). In it, he warned about the “possibility of a pandemic,” writing that while there were only five confirmed cases in the U.S. The first public statement that we found from Biden about the coronavirus came in an op-ed for USA Today on Jan. That was more than a month before the earliest known instances of the disease occurred in early December in Wuhan, China, and more than two months before Chinese officials reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization on Dec. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We start with one comment from Biden via Twitter from October 2019, before the coronavirus emerged. While some of his comments about the potential danger of the virus have proved prescient, Biden was not as far ahead of the curve as he sometimes makes it seem when it came to calls for deterrents like social distancing and wearing masks. We reviewed all of Biden’s public comments that we could find in early 2020 about the coronavirus. We’ve got a real problem.” The op-ed did not go that far. 17, claiming that in January he wrote an op-ed “saying, we’ve got a pandemic. 28 campaign rally in South Carolina.Ĭonversely, Biden stretched the facts at a CNN town hall on Sept. The “coronavirus is a serious public health challenge,” Biden said at a Feb.
The former vice president warned early about the potential danger posed by the virus, and about the need for a thoughtful response by the federal government. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden have made competing claims about Biden’s early statements on the coronavirus.įollowing the disclosure of comments he made to journalist Bob Woodward in March about downplaying the coronavirus, Trump has tried to turn the tables on Biden, claiming it was Biden who maintained through late February that the coronavirus was “not even going to be a problem.” That’s not accurate.
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