The Top 10 Lies About President Trump’s Response to the Coronavirus
President
Donald Trump speaks during a press briefing with the coronavirus task
force, at the White House, Tuesday, March 17, 2020, in Washington. (AP
Photo/Evan Vucci)
It’s
troubling to see how quickly disinformation about the government’s
response to the coronavirus has spread. Democrats and the mainstream
media have willingly spread false information in the hopes of damaging
Trump politically before the election in November. Many of these lies
were quickly debunked, but that hasn’t stopped the false information
from being repeated over and over. The left hopes these lies will
continue to spread, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working since Trump’s approval numbers for his handling of the pandemic have gone up.
But that doesn’t mean the left will give up their disinformation
campaign. To help set the record straight, I’ve compiled the top ten
lies that have been spread about Trump’s response to the coronavirus
pandemic. There are certainly plenty more, and you are welcome to
mention them in the comments.
10. Trump downplayed the mortality rate of the coronavirus
In
early March, the World Health Organization said that 3.4 percent of
coronavirus patients had died from the disease. “Globally, about 3.4% of
reported COVID-19 (the disease spread by the virus) cases have died,”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing. “By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.”
Trump
said this number was false, as the mortality rate was actually much
less because their number didn’t take into account unreported cases. In
an interview with Sean Hannity on March 4, Trump challenged WHO’s
number. “Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” Trump said, asserting that the actual mortality rate is “way under 1 percent.”
And Trump was right. He wasn’t downplaying the mortality rate, as has been suggested. As testing in the United States has increased, the mortality rate has decreased. The same is true worldwide.
Yet,
there were so-called experts who greatly overestimated the mortality
rate in order to spark fear and panic. MSNBC contributor Dr. Joseph Fair
told a panel that up to 20 percent of the U.S. population might die from the coronavirus.
9. Trump lied when he said Google was developing a national coronavirus website
When
President Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency, he
announced that Google was developing a website to direct people to
coronavirus testing locations nationwide.
"I
want to thank Google. Google is helping to develop a website, it’s
going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine
whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby
convenient location," Trump said during a press conference.
Google confirmed this in a tweet after Trump’s remarks, but the media seemed intent on calling Trump’s claim false. HuffPost literally called Trump’s claim a lie
because the site was actually being developed by a subsidiary of
Google’s parent company, Alphabet. This ultimately forced Google to
confirm, again, that they were partnering with the federal government to
develop a national coronavirus website. “Google is partnering with the
US Government in developing a nationwide website that includes
information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk and testing information,”
Google said on Twitter.
After
Google backed up Trump, he thanked them and ripped the media for
spreading fake news. "I want to thank the people at Google and Google
communications because as you know they substantiated what I said on
Friday," Trump said.
"The head of Google, who is a great gentleman, called us and he
apologized. I don't know where the press got their fake news, but they
got it someplace. As you know, this is from Google. They put out a
release and you guys can figure it out yourselves and how that got out.
And I'm sure you guys will apologize, but it would be great if we could
get really give the news correctly. It'd be so, so wonderful."
8. Trump "dissolved" the WH pandemic response office
Two days after Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency, the Washington Post ran an opinion piece
by Elizabeth Cameron, who ran the White House pandemic office under
Obama, alleging that Trump had dissolved the office in 2018. She claimed
because of this, “the federal government’s slow response to the
coronavirus isn’t a surprise.”
This claim spread like wildfire, even though it was completely false. Days after WaPo
ran the piece, they published another article by Tim Morrison, former
senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National
Security Council, who debunked the allegation made by Cameron and other
former Obama administration officials.
What good is there
in spreading false information, as Elizabeth Cameron did? “This is
Washington. It’s an election year,” Morrison laments.
“Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the
middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making
tendentious accusations.”
7. Trump ignored early intel briefings on possible pandemic
The Washington Post again was the source of another bogus claim
when they reported that intelligence agencies warned about a possible
pandemic back in January and February and that Trump “failed to take
action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen.”
It was fake news.
The Trump administration had begun aggressively addressing the
coronavirus threat immediately after China reported the discovery of the
coronavirus to the World Health Organization. In addition to
implementing various precautionary travel restrictions, the
administration fast-tracked the use of testing kits, set up a
Coronavirus Task Force, and implemented a travel ban with China, several
weeks before WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic.
In actuality, it was Trump’s critics who weren’t taking the coronavirus situation seriously. Joe Biden even accused Trump of “fearmongering” and “xenophobia” for his travel ban. Even now, the Washington Post is suggesting the travel ban wasn’t enough.
6. Trump cut funding to the CDC & NIH
Back
in February both Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg (who hadn’t dropped out
of the Democratic primary yet) accused President Trump of cutting
funding to critical health agencies during a primary debate. “There’s
nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he’s
defunded — he’s defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t
have the organization we need. This is a very serious thing," Bloomberg
claimed.
The Obama-Biden
administration "increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH
budget. ... He’s wiped all that out. ... He cut the funding for the
entire effort," Biden claimed.
They were both wrong.
According to an Associated Press fact-check,
proposed budget cuts never happened, and funding increased. They
acknowledged that some public health experts believe that a bigger
concern than White House budgets “is the steady erosion of a CDC grant
program for state and local public health emergency preparedness,” but,
they note, “that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget
measure that predates Trump.”
The
AP also noted that “The public health system has a playbook to follow
for pandemic preparation — regardless of who’s president or whether
specific instructions are coming from the White House. Those plans were
put into place in anticipation of another flu pandemic, but are designed
to work for any respiratory-borne disease.”
5. Trump "muzzled" Dr. Fauci
In late February, the New York Times claimed
that the Trump administration had “muzzled” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID), by preventing him from speaking publicly about the coronavirus
without approval from the administration.
It
wasn’t true. But, the claim was echoed throughout the mainstream media,
and ultimately was brought up in a press briefing, and Trump was asked
directly about it, and he let Dr. Fauci clear it up.
“I’ve never been muzzled, ever, and I’ve been doing this since Reagan,” he said. “I’m not being muzzled by this administration.”
Despite
the fact this claim was debunked, Joe Biden kept repeating it as if it
were true. “And, look, right now you have this president, hasn’t allowed
his scientists to speak, number one,” Biden said on ABC's This Week
a couple days after Fauci said unequivocally he wasn’t being muzzled.
“He has the vice president speaking, not the scientists who know what
they're talking about, like Fauci."
4. Trump didn’t act quickly and isn’t doing enough
If
you listen to Democrats, Trump didn’t act quickly enough and is
botching the government response. Joe Biden has tried to perpetuate this
falsehood by giving press briefings telling Trump what he should be
doing.
The big problem with that is that when Biden has offered his own plan, he simply took things that Trump had already done, said he should do those things, and pretended they were his own ideas.
In
addition to this, one of the most significant actions taken by Trump,
the travel ban with China, was actually opposed by Joe Biden, and
Trump’s critics on the left. Unfortunately for them, WHO experts
admitted Trump’s actions saved lives in the United States.
Fox News contributor Liz Peek noted back in February, “Even before a single case of the virus erupted
organically in our country [...] and even as the administration had
acted preemptively and effectively to keep virus carriers out of our
country, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and
others were eager to stoke fear and blame Donald Trump.”
Dr. Ronny Jackson, who served as White House physician from 2013 to 2018, also credited
Trump for his decisive response to the coronavirus epidemic. "The
president has done everything he needed to do in this case," he said.
"He’s acted quickly and decisively. He did what he always has done ...
he went with his instincts."
Jackson
added, "What’s going on in Italy and Iran is not going to happen here I
think, because of the president's quick and decisive actions. I think
we are going to be more in line with what’s going on in South Korea and
things of that nature.”
3. Trump told governors they were “on their own”
In a tweet sent last week, New York Times
editorial board member Mara Gay claimed that during a conference call
with governors about the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump told them they were “on their own” in getting the equipment they need.
“‘Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it
yourselves,’ Mr. Trump told the governors during the conference call, a
recording of which was shared with The New York Times.”
She lied. Ms. Gay deliberately misrepresented Trump’s words. Trump actually told governors on the call:
“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it
yourselves. We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point
of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”
The
false narrative that Trump had told governors they were on their own,
essentially to expect no help from the federal government, spread like
wildfire.
2. Trump turned down testing kits from WHO
A Politico hit piece from early March
claimed that the World Health Organization offered the United States
coronavirus testing kits, but Trump refused to accept them. This claim
spread quickly, and Joe Biden even alluded to it during his March 15
debate with Bernie Sanders, claiming, “The World Health Organization
offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us
now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them.”
It wasn’t true.
"No discussions occurred between WHO and CDC about WHO providing
COVID-19 tests to the United States," WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris
explained. "This is consistent with experience since the United States
does not ordinarily rely on WHO for reagents or diagnostic tests because
of sufficient domestic capacity." According to WHO, its priority was to
send testing kits to "countries with the weakest health systems."
So, why did testing get off to a slow start in the United States? Ellie Bufkin at our sister site Townhall noted that
“Testing in the United States was fraught with difficulty in large part
due to the slow approval by the Food and Drug Administration to allow
testing kits developed by private companies outside of the
government-controlled CDC to be used at a local or national level. Those
FDA policies are consistent with the Obama Administration's response to
H1N1 and Ebola in 2009 and 2014 respectively.”
1. Trump called the coronavirus “a hoax”
To
this day the left (and the media) claim Trump called the coronavirus a
hoax. He said no such thing. While the country was distracted by
impeachment, the Trump administration was busy addressing the
coronavirus outbreak, taking various measures to limit the spread of the
virus in the United States. Impeachment quickly faded, so they decided
to aggressively politicize his response to the coronavirus outbreak. Joe
Biden even called Trump’s travel ban with China an overreaction, and
accused him of trying to scare the public. “This is no time for Donald
Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia ± hysterical xenophobia — and
fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.”
President
Trump responded to these allegations during a rally in South Carolina,
calling the Democrats’ politicization of the coronavirus "the new hoax."
The media jumped on this line, claiming that Trump called the virus,
not the Democrats' reactions to it, a hoax. The lie spread like wildfire and Joe Biden even used the lie as a talking point on the stump. There was quite a stir when Politico’s story repeating the false claim that Trump called the virus a hoax was flagged by Facebook fact-checkers as fake news, but other fact-checkers couldn’t deny that the claim was false either.
