Vice claims Trump killed 130,000 by COVID, won’t examine Biden death toll
October 29, 2021
Vice News virtually rewrote the Democrat press release as a news item from testimony of Dr. Deborah Birx at the select subcommittee on the Coronavirus.
In it, Vice places the direct blame for 130,000 COVID-19 deaths in 2020 on then-President Donald Trump, while ignoring that in October the COVID-19 death toll for 2021 already exceeds 2020, with all but three weeks coming under Joe Biden.
Data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center says that 352,000 people died from COVID-19 in 2020, while according to the New York Times, the overall death toll is 741,000, leaving a balance of 389,000 deaths in 2021 under Biden.
In part, the higher death toll, under Birx’s logic, should also be ascribed to Biden, because under Joe Biden, the country has done virtually none of the things that Birx said Trump should have done.
“I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent–less to 40 percent–less range,” Birx told the committee according to Vice News.
Yet, despite promising to institute a nationwide mask mandate when campaigning, Biden has yet to do that or any of the other things Birx talked about in her testimony.
While it’s true that Biden has issued an order for masking in federal facilities, Trump didn’t need to during the worst of the pandemic because federal were virtually closed to humans until July 2020.
If a mask and social distancing saved lives, how many lives were saved when the federal offices were closed by Trump?
What has Biden done to increase social distancing? Or to prevent parties in private homes, like at Obama’s birthday bash? Or to increase testing above what was happening previously?
“It is directly as a result of the CDC’s actions back in May — and the Biden administration’s lack of leadership — that we have the surge that we’re seeing now,” said Dr. Leana Wen, professor of health policy and management at George Washington University. “What let Delta gain a foothold? It was because of people’s actions that were directly enabled by the Biden administration’s response.”
Despite promises to take a different approach to prevent the spread of Biden has leaned heavily on vaccines, a tool that Trump didn’t have, even though the vaccines were developed under his administration.
Without vaccines, Biden would have little COVID policy at all.
When asked about the potential for a lockdown to prevent the spread of the Delta variant of the COVID19 virus, Biden said that the vaccines were so effective that there was no reason to do that.
“The existing vaccines are very effective so no, it’s not a lockdown, but some areas will be very hurt,” Biden said, according to Newsweek.
Yet at the same time, the CDC’s Dr. Anthony Fauci was calling the Delta variant the biggest threat to containing COVID.
But unlike when Trump was president, the press treats disagreements between Biden and public health officials as the normal results of policy differences versus the intentional homicide they tagged Trump with.