Joe Biden Makes Wildly False Claim: 120 Million Have Died from COVID
Former Vice President Joe Biden has always been gaffe-prone.
But over the past year or so, it seems the Democratic presidential nominee’s verbal missteps have gotten worse. He has stumbled through speeches and often made incoherent remarks, leading many people to believe he is showing signs of cognitive decline.
On Thursday, Biden took his proclivity for gaffes to a new level when he claimed that over 120 million people in the United States have died from the coronavirus.
“People don’t have a job, people don’t have anywhere to go, they don’t know what they’re going to do,” he said at an event on health care in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
“A lot of people, you have, unnecessarily — now we have over 120 million dead from COVID.”
The actual number is more than 124,000 deaths as of Friday, according to data from Johns Hopkins. While that is a significant and tragic figure, it is not remotely close to 120 million.
Now, it did sound as though Biden was about to correct himself following the gaffe, but the live stream of his remarks froze before those not physically present could hear what he said next. It wasn’t clear why, with Fox News simply reporting that “the pool video of Biden’s comments cuts off after he made the remark.”
In an interview later in the day with Fox host Sean Hannity, President Donald Trump slammed Biden over the gaffe.
“That’s a serious error. That’s not a permissible type of error because there’s something going on,” the president said.
This is not the first time Biden has cited wildly implausible numbers.
During a debate in February, Biden claimed that over 150 million people have been killed by guns since 2007 — a number which approaches half of the nation’s current population of 330 million, as the Washington Examiner pointed out. (The gaffe looks even sillier when you compare it to the number of deaths from communism in the 20th century, which historians have estimated to be between 85 million and 100 million.)
Meanwhile, Biden said last September that his child tax credit would put “720 million women back in the workforce,” a figure that represents more than double the current U.S. population.
Biden’s constant verbal slip-ups are painful to watch. In fact, a recent Zogby poll found a majority of “likely voters” — 55 percent — thought it was more likely than not that Biden had dementia.
The Democratic Party wants Americans to elect a man who is facing some serious questions about his cognitive state. At this point, it is very fair to wonder whether Biden is capable of taking on the responsibilities of one of the most important jobs in the world.
Biden is also making radical suggestions about what he would do as president during the pandemic.
The same day as his gaffe about the number of people who have died from the coronavirus, he announced that as president, he would do everything is his power to mandate that Americans nationwide wear masks while in public. This would be an obvious overreach of presidential power.
Biden has been making campaign statements throughout this crisis that reveal he has little grasp of the roots of the pandemic.
For instance, after Trump cut off funding to the World Health Organization due to that organization’s serious mishandling of the virus, Biden vowed to restore it.
The United States cannot afford to have a man like Joe Biden in office. In addition to legitimate questions about his cognitive abilities, it’s clear that the policies he supports would hurt this nation, not help it.
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