Fact Check: Biden Claims Trump Responsible for 200K Deaths

CLAIM: 2020 Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that President Donald Trump is responsible for 220,000 deaths.

VERDICT: FALSE. The coronavirus originated in Wuhan, China, and the nation was not forthcoming about the severity of the outbreak. Moreover, leaked documents show that the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) was aware that China was withholding key information, yet the organization publicly praised the communist country for its purported transparency.

“220,000 Americans dead,” said Biden during the second presidential debate on Thursday evening.”If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this — anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America,” he added.

The former vice president is wrong in his assessment that President Trump is to blame for the Wuhan virus.

In June, the AP reported on leaked documents revealing that the W.H.O. was aware that China was withholding information on the severity of the virus as early as January, as Breitbart News detailed:

The AP report described a massive disconnect between W.H.O.’s public statements and the private frustration of its officials as the Chinese “sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the deadly virus for over a week after multiple government labs had fully decoded it, not sharing details key to designing tests, drugs, and vaccines.”

The report noted that even after a Chinese lab seemingly broke with Communist Party officials and published the genome of the Wuhan coronavirus, “China stalled for at least two more weeks on giving W.H.O. the details it needed, according to recordings of multiple internal meetings held by the UN health agency in January.”

“Although the W.H.O. continued to publicly commend China, the recordings show they were concerned China was not sharing enough information to assess the risk posed by the new virus, costing the world valuable time,” the AP report said.

A leaked intelligence report also revealed that the Chinese regime “went about ‘disappearing’ whistle-blowing doctors, censored news about the outbreak, destroyed samples of the virus in laboratories, and refused to hand over samples to international scientists, delaying the ability to manufacture a cure for the virus,” as Breitbart News detailed.

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