President Donald Trump, touting his own response to the current coronavirus outbreak, blasted the response by the Obama administration and specifically Joe Biden for the 2009 swine flu epidemic.
His comments came in a Thursday night tweet. He wrote: “Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record. Our response is one of the best, with fast action of border closings & a 78% Approval Rating, the highest on record. His was lowest!”
The Washington Post noted that Trump did not cite the source of the high approval rating, but could have been referring to a Gallup poll of nearly a month ago when there was only a single American case of the coronavirus.
In another Thursday tweet, Trump quoted Fox Business host Lou Dobbs discussing Biden and comments made by the then-vice president about swine flu.
He wrote: “The Obama White House had to immediately issue an apology for Joe Biden’s remarks, and any alarm that he might have caused, an alarm about a Swine Flu outbreak that took 6 months for President Obama to declare a National Emergency, and that killed 12,000 Americans.” @LouDobbs.
Trump continued his attacks on the Obama administration on Friday morning. In a pair of tweets, he wrote: “For decades the @CDCgov looked at, and studied, its testing system, but did nothing about it. It would always be inadequate and slow for a large scale pandemic, but a pandemic would never happen, they hoped. President (Barack) Obama made changes that only complicated things further."
He added: “Their response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now."
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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