Biden’s campaign on Monday criticized President Trump for “openly lying” to the American people about the threat of the new coronavirus, after the president claimed over the weekend that most coronavirus cases are “harmless.”
Trump said over the weekend that “99%” of coronavirus cases in the United States are “totally harmless,” while White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows echoed the President’s claim during an interview on “Fox & Friends” early Monday morning.
“I don’t even know what a generalization is,” Meadows said. “When you start looking at the statistics and all the numbers we have, the amount of evidence we have, the vast majority of people are safe from this.”
MEADOWS SAYS THERE WILL BE NO NATIONAL MANDATE MANDATE BETWEEN CORONAVIRUSES
Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates called Trump in a statement Monday, stating that the president “has had more than six months to stop abysmally failing the American people during this historic public health crisis.”
“But despite the fact that more than 132,000 Americans have lost their lives and tens of millions have lost their jobs due to their unprecedented negligence and incompetence, they have surrendered to the coronavirus and, for the sake of their own optics, are directly lying to the nation on the extreme threat of COVID-19 while undermining the evidence, “Bates said.
Bates continued to criticize the White House, alleging that they are “telling Americans that they just need to ‘live with it.'”
“It is a tragic comment on the rotten values and dangerousness of this administration that listening to the president and his senior staff could literally jeopardize more American lives than its malpractice has already taken,” Bates said. “And the 1 percent of the United States is 3.2 million people.”
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White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the president’s comments and said she was “noticing the fact that the vast majority of Americans who get coronaviruses will come out on the other side of this.”
“Of course he takes it very seriously,” McEnany said Monday. “Of course, no one wants to see anyone in this country hire COVID, so this administration has struggled a lot to make sure that is not the case with our historic response effort.”
McEnany also said the president’s comments were “rooted in science,” referring to two charts from the European CDC, revealing that the “death rate in this country is very low.”
As of Monday, the United States reported nearly 2.9 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 130,000 deaths.
