Even 4 Months in, Joe Biden Is Calling Virus 'COVID-9' and Getting Basic Facts Wrong
For Democrats with nothing to lose heading into the 2020 elections, the outbreak of COVID-19 was likely seen as an opportunity.
Every death, every drop in the stock market and every lost job could be pinned on President Donald Trump by a sharp politician.
Unfortunately for the left, Democrats have placed all their presidential hopes on the shoulders of one man — former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
And Biden, who sometimes has trouble remembering which state he’s in, is anything but a sharp politician.
Nearly four months after the outbreak started in China, and after almost two months of near-constant outbreak coverage on every news station, Biden still failed to get the most basic facts of the outbreak correct during a coronavirus town hall Wednesday.
Asked what he would do to prepare for the next pandemic by Democratic Florida state Rep. Shevrin Jones, Biden revealed how little he truly knows about the novel coronavirus.
The relevant portion can be seen at around the 10-minute mark of the video below:
“Well, there’s a number of things that I would do,” Biden said. “Number one, I would reinstate the office that existed in the White House when we left of a pandemic office.”
Of course, Trump never cut the White House’s ability to detect pandemics. The lie regurgitated by Biden circulated in mainstream media, but was quickly debunked by an insider.
“Secondly,” Biden later continued, “we had a lot of people from the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] stationed overseas to see, to get an out-front look at what was coming, what was coming to the United States of America in terms of further pandemics. We knew what happened with Ebola. We knew what happened with H1N1.”
Despite claiming to know “what happened with H1N1,” Biden has previously distanced himself from the Obama administration’s failures when it came to dealing with the outbreak.
Apparently, he only wants to be associated with his former boss when it makes him look good.
“We have to invest more money in dealing with pandemic research, dealing with viruses, dealing with studies relating to what these viruses are likely to be in the future,” Biden later said. “There’s more than one coronavirus.”
“This COVID-9 is one strain of that, and there’s a lot of means we have to take now to make sure we have the testing capacity nationally to deal with what will be coming, not just what has already come.”
The disease rampaging across the world is not “COVID-9,” as Biden said, but COVID-19. It’s unclear why he made this obvious error, as the proper name can be seen in headlines across all forms of media.
It should be noted that COVID-19 is not a strain of anything, but simply a shortening of “coronavirus disease 2019,” named after the year the illness was first identified. It appears Biden was confusing the disease for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes it.
What Biden did get correct is that coronavirus is not one specific germ but an entire group of related viruses, responsible for diseases such as the common cold, SARS and COVID-19.
Biden’s confusion on the basic aspects of the pandemic doesn’t bode well his for his potential presidency, during which he would be expected to keep up with not only outbreaks but national security threats, the economy and other domestic issues.
While the Democratic candidate’s former gaffes could easily be blamed on the stresses of the campaign trail, stay-at-home orders and social isolation have seemingly given Biden plenty of time at home to rest.
It seems his behavior will continue to fuel speculation on the state of his mental health.
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