Biden Gets Busted by Politifact for False Story That Trump Rejected WHO Tests

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Vice President Joe Biden, participates in a Democratic presidential primary debate at CNN Studios, Sunday, March 15, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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There have been a lot of lies Democrats and the media have told about the response of the Trump administration to the Wuhan virus.

If we just look at the lies that Joe Biden alone has told, it’s pretty bad.

Here’s just a shortlist that Biden claimed (there’s probably more):

Trump said the virus was a hoax. He didn’t.
Trump muzzled scientists like Dr. Fauci. Fauci has said and shown he clearly wasn’t “muzzled.” Joe said that even after Fauci had given briefings.
Trump cut the CDC. In fact, funding was increased.

Biden even got 4 Pinocchios for putting out an ad full of lies, including the hoax claim.

But Biden repeated another lie this week when he claimed that Trump had turned down Wuhan coronavirus tests from the WHO and he was even busted by Politifact for it. If you haven’t heard about it, the media has given it barely any coverage.

From Politifact:

During Sunday night’s debate, while levelling criticism at President Donald Trump’s handling of the national response to the coronavirus pandemic, former Vice President Joe Biden said the Trump administration refused to get coronavirus testing kits from the World Health Organization.

“Look, the World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them. We did not want to get them from them. We wanted to make sure we had our own,” Biden said.

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This lie has been seen a lot on social media. But it has no basis in reality.

The Biden campaign later claimed that we weren’t one of the countries that got WHO kits at the end of February.

That’s true. But what they left out was that we were never offered them because WHO sends its kits to poorer countries that are in need. They never send such things to us and they never offered the kits to us. So no, we never turned them down.

“No discussions occurred between WHO and CDC about WHO providing COVID-19 tests to the United States,” said WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris. “This is consistent with experience since the United States does not ordinarily rely on WHO for reagents or diagnostic tests because of sufficient domestic capacity.”

According to interviews with several infectious disease experts, Biden’s statement leaves out key context regarding how different countries decided on which test they’d use to identify the presence of the coronavirus.

Gee, Biden left out information and lied again? What a surprise.

The WHO adopted a test the Germans came up with. The CDC came out with their own protocol about 9 days later. It’s apparently common for the CDC to come up with their own protocol and they did the same for the Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

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The CDC’s test was different and more complicated than the German test. It worked in the CDC lab, but when the materials went out to state labs, some of them got inconsistent results. The CDC had to resend packages with new chemical reagents. The CDC’s turnaround now was actually quicker than for things like Zika.

State laboratories started developing their own tests and were ready to use them, but had to wait for emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration. All of this added up to a delay in testing capabilities which resulted in fewer Americans being tested and an overall slower U.S. response compared to other countries.

The problem in the CDC test was part of a manufacturing defect, not the fault of the CDC.

So good for Politifact for breaking it all down. Where’s the rest of the media coverage on this lie?

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