Former Vice President Joe Biden answered a question Wednesday about his mental fitness for office by declaring: “I am not the guy who said to inject bleach in your arm.”

Biden was conducting a masked, socially-distant interview with Cullen Browder of Raleigh, North Carolina’s NBC affiliate WRAL:

Q: For those North Carolina voters … who may question whether you are physically, mentally fit for this job, how do you respond right now?

Biden: Watch me. I am not the guy who said to inject bleach in your arm. You want to talk about who know — and I do know the difference between truth and lies. Between good and bad. Between hope and fear.

In a separate interview with Charlotte North Carolina’s WECT, another NBC affiliate, Biden explained why he would be hesitant to take a coronavirus vaccine unless Dr. Anthony Fauci recommended it.

“Look at all the lies [Trump]’s told already,” he said. “All the ridiculous things he’s said — inject bleach in your arm, you may be able to get rid of it — I mean, why would anybody believe him?”

Trump never told anyone to inject bleach, much less in their arm. Nor did he tell anyone to injest bleach — another common Democratic Party talking point. On Thursday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) claimed — falsely — that Trump told people to “swallow Clorox.”

As Breitbart News has noted, and as the transcripts of White House press briefings confirm, Trump was discussing the future use of experimental ultraviolet light technology to disinfect surfaces and remove the coronavirus. The UV technology is already being used to disinfect offices and other spaces. Trump wondered openly whether it might be possible to “inject” UV light into the body — a technology that is currently in development, and which was reported in the media just days before.

When he was asked a follow-up question about whether he thought disinfectant should be “injected into a person,” Trump said no: “It wouldn’t be through injection. We’re talking about through almost a cleaning, sterilization of an area.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.