Kamala Harris Tells a Coronavirus Whopper *Twice*, Fact Checkers Nowhere To Be Found

I’ve never run for political office, but a person doesn’t have to do so to understand that it’s grueling.

Day in and day out you’re in front of either voters or reporters – sometimes both. Giving speeches, answering questions, making promises. When you’re not doing that, you’re strategizing with campaign staffers, and perhaps seeking out coveted endorsements.

There are the hours upon hours of traveling, the days that go by when you don’t see your family for long stretches of time. More often than not you’re eating out of a paper bag.

Here we are in the final days leading up to election day. And though Joe Biden’s campaign schedule mostly revolves around the basement strategy he has been following since the pandemic started, his vice-presidential running mate Sen. Kamala Harris is picking up the slack by traveling from city to city.

But twice now in the last week, Harris has made claims about Wuhan virus deaths that at the very least should have reporters en masse taking to the Twitter machine to correct the record, and at most generate a fact check from the likes of Politifact, FactCheck.org, CNN’s Daniel Dale, and/or the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler among others.

Watch the below two clips, where Harris claims 220,000,000 Americans have died from the Wuhan virus over the last few months. The first one is from a stop she made in North Carolina:

.@KamalaHarris: "We're looking at over 220 million Americans who just in the last several months, died." pic.twitter.com/kjUrGqaMLG

— Joel Fischer (@JFNYC1) October 22, 2020

Here’s the second clip from an Ohio campaign stop, via MRC-TV:

Were these gaffes by a tired Kamala Harris? Probably. At the time she made the comments, the number of American deaths from COVID was listed at around 220,000. But false claims like this, whether accidental or deliberate, have a way of making the rounds to people who don’t take the time to check for themselves to see if they’re true or not.

And if 220,000,000 people in America really had died from the coronavirus, that would be a massively huge issue, considering our population is around 330,000,000. That would mean roughly 2/3rds of the American population died from COVID.

While every death is tragic, and 220,000 certainly isn’t a small number, it’s a VERY far cry from 220 million. So where are the fact-checkers on this? Nowhere to be found.

Considering we’re in a country where just last week supposed “immigration experts” were aghast over Trump using the (accurate) term “coyotes” to describe human smugglers at the border (his critics thought he was literally referring to coyotes), then I’d say yes, Kamala Harris’ claims – whether intentional or not, need to be corrected by the media in a meaningful way.

I mean, they’d do it if Trump made erroneous claims about Wuhan virus case/death numbers, why not do it in this instance as well?

Because, as I wrote last week, fact-checking for all intents and purposes in this country is dead, because members of the mainstream press simply can’t keep their liberal biases to themselves. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if these same fact-checkers in the MSM wanted people to believe the wildly inflated number, because Orange Man Bad and all that.

How many people going to vote next week will do so for Biden based in part on what Harris said last week about “220,000,000 American deaths”? The exact number is anyone’s guess, but one is too many, in my humble opinion.