Fact Check: More Coronavirus Deaths Under Joe Biden

CLAIM: There were more coronavirus deaths under President Joe Biden’s leadership.

VERDICT: True. Coronavirus deaths in Biden’s first ten months in office surpassed the death toll under former President Donald Trump.

Biden attempted to bash Trump for the coronavirus pandemic at the start of Thursday’s debate, but Trump pointed out that there were more coronavirus deaths under Biden.

“We had an economy that was in free fall. The pandemic was so badly handled. Many people were dying,” Biden said.

“We got hit with COVID. We did a lot to fix it. I gave him an unbelievable situation with all of the therapeutics and all of the things that we came up with,” Trump replied. “We gave him something great — remember, more people died under his administration, even though we had largely fixed it. More people died under his administration than our administration.”

Trump continued:

And we were right in the middle of it — something which a lot of people don’t like to talk about — but he had far more people dying in his administration. He did the mandate, which is a disaster, mandating it. The vaccine went out. He did a mandate on the vaccine, which is the thing that people most objected to about the vaccine, and he did a very poor job, just a very poor job. And I will tell you, not only poor there but throughout the entire world. We’re no longer respected as a country. They don’t respect our leadership.

Indeed, as Breitbart News reported in December 2021, the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus during Biden’s first ten months in office surpassed the death toll recorded during Trump’s last 12 months in office, when vaccines against the virus were not even available.

As Breitbart News reported at the time:

Approximately 396,529 people in the United States have died from the Wuhan virus under Joe Biden before he has even reached his eleventh month in office — surpassing the entire U.S. coronavirus death toll recorded in one year under Donald Trump.

The nationwide coronavirus death toll — which was at 396,442 when Biden first took office — is now 792,971 as of Wednesday, according to statistics provided by Johns Hopkins University.

Biden took office nearly one year to the date after the first U.S. recorded coronavirus case, and within his first ten months as president, the country has seen that death toll more than double.

Ironically, it was Biden who said during an October 2020 debate with Trump that “anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths” should “not remain as president of the United States of America.” The figure was around 220,000 at that time.