PJ Media:
Regardless of how the election turns out, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the result will be discussed for many years. Media disinformation has made the pandemic a liability for Trump politically, and Joe Biden has not considered himself above politicizing the pandemic for political gain.
With the media’s help, Joe Biden has managed to poll better than Trump when it comes to handling the pandemic, even though Joe Biden hasn’t suggested doing anything different than has been done already by Trump.
The weaponizing of the COVID-19 pandemic against Donald Trump has been shameful. The media, the Democrats, and Joe Biden’s campaign don’t care about lying to the American people, they just want Trump defeated. There have been many, many falsehoods perpetuated by the media during this pandemic, and I’ve compiled the top twenty below to demonstrate just how low Trump’s enemies have gone to try to oust him.
20. 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 claimed “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,” during a Democratic primary debate back in March.
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 at the time. “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.”
19. 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 lower 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. The mortality rate of COVID-19 has been consistently going down. By May, the CDC estimated the overall mortality rate for COVID-19 to be .26 percent. Trump got criticized for “downplaying” the coronavirus. Where is the criticism for the so-called experts who greatly overestimated the mortality rate in order to spark fear and panic? For example, MSNBC contributor Dr. Joseph Fair told a panel on the network that up to 20 percent of the U.S. population might die from the coronavirus.
18. Obama did a better job with H1N1
The common refrain from the left when comparisons are made between the government’s responses to H1N1 and COVID-19 is that only 12,469 died from H1N1, according to the CDC. But this leaves out important context. The CDC estimates that in the United States alone between April 12, 2009, and April 10, 2010, there were nearly 61 million cases of H1N1.
Based on these numbers, H1N1 had a mortality rate of .02 percent. According to the CDC’s May estimate, the coronavirus has an overall mortality rate of .4 percent for symptomatic cases (or .26 percent if you include asymptomatic cases) meaning that the coronavirus is 13-20 times more deadly than H1N1.
The coronavirus is not only magnitudes more deadly than H1N1, but also more infectious. According to a study from Emerging Infectious Diseases, COVID-19 has a median R0 value (a mathematical term for how contagious a disease is) of 5.7, while H1N1 had an R0 value between 1.4 and 1.6. So COVID-19 is nearly four times more infectious and 13-20 times more deadly than H1N1. This is a point that President Trump has brought up during the presidential debates.
Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time and is currently advising his campaign, says it was mere luck that H1N1 wasn’t more deadly.
[For numbers 17 down to 3, refer to the PJ Media article]
2. The United States ‘leads the world’ in COVID-19 deaths
Every COVID-19 milestone reported by the media seems to want to paint the United States as having the worst record against the virus. “US Leads the World in Death Toll from Coronavirus with 150,000,” the Associated Press reported on July 29. Many other outlets have published similar stories over the past few months. This is obviously by design, as the media selectively uses raw numbers over per capita statistics, or ignores proper context. For example, confirmed cases have skyrocketed in the United States, but the United States is also leading the world in tests given, both in raw numbers and per capita. Naturally, case numbers for the United States are going to go up relative to other countries. Of course, I’ve always maintained that comparing countries by confirmed cases, even per capita, is not a great metric because those numbers rely so much on testing capability, which varies from country to country.
COVID-19 deaths per capita is a far more reliable metric to base a comparison on, so let’s look at the numbers as compiled by Statista.
- Peru (1055.51 per million)
- Belgium (984.67)
- Spain (757.04)
- Bolivia (756.1)
- Brazil 753.23)
- Chile (744.93)
- Ecuador (726.5)
- Mexico (711.52
- United States (693.86)
- United Kingdom (686.25)
The United States doesn’t have the highest number of deaths per capita in the world. Oh, but wait, there’s more. In the past, I’ve pointed out how Governor Cuomo botched New York’s response to the pandemic, turning New York (and more specifically, New York City) into the epicenter of the pandemic for the entire world—skewing the United States’ numbers. I’ve previously shown how the rankings change when you separate New York from the rest of the country. Let’s see how the rankings look now:
- New York State (1,711.93 per million)
- Peru (1,055.51 per million)
- Belgium (984.67)
- Spain (757.04)
- Bolivia (756.1)
- Brazil 753.23)
- Chile (744.93)
- Ecuador (726.5)
- Mexico (711.52)
- United Kingdom (686.25)
New York State comes in on top, while the rest of the United States drops out of the top ten entirely, sinking to #15 with 629.99 deaths per million. So much for “leading the world” in COVID-19 deaths.
1. Trump called the coronavirus “a hoax”
To this day Joe Biden, the left, and the media all 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.
Read the rest in this fabulous article at PJ Media
