Biden Has Earned 11 Pinocchios From Fact-Checkers During Coronavirus Crisis

[Happy New Year]

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has been dinged several
times by fact-checkers over claims he has made during the
coronavirus crisis, including a total of 11 "Pinocchios" from the
Washington Post.

Over the course of three weeks between March 13 and April 3, Biden
was fact-checked five separate times for making false or misleading
claims concerning the Trump administration's handling of the
pandemic.

A Washington Post fact check on March 13 awarded Biden four
Pinocchios, the fact-checker's most severe rating, for two
manipulated videos the Biden campaign circulated.

The first video claimed to show Trump at a Feb. 28 rally saying
Democrats were turning the coronavirus into "their new hoax" after
they failed to bring Trump down through impeachment. Biden's video
was edited to make it appear that Trump was calling the coronavirus
a hoax. Trump, however, was referring to the Democrats' attempts to
blame him for the virus, not the virus itself.

The second Biden campaign video showed Trump saying the phrase "the
American Dream is dead," which the Post found was taken out of
context and missing the second part of Trump's statement where he
promised to "bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever
before."

Another Post fact check on March 24 gave the campaign four
Pinocchios after adviser Ron Klain accused Trump of silencing Dr.
Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The president and the White House sent a clear message to
scientists in the government—there would be a price for speaking out
and speaking up," he said in a campaign video released on March 21.

Messonnier continued to hold routine phone briefings with reporters
in the weeks after she raised the alarm about the virus at a press
conference with Trump.

Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote that Klain's framing was
"simply wrong." Messonnier's alarming rhetoric did irritate Trump,
but the idea that she was silenced was a "false narrative," Kessler
added.

At a CNN town hall on March 27, Biden repeated an earlier claim that
Trump had eliminated the White House pandemic office. He also
claimed Trump made "no effort" to put any pressure on Chinese
president Xi Jinping and reduced the CDC's staff in China prior to
the outbreak. Biden added he called for China to admit medical
experts from the United States when the outbreak in China was still
in its early stages.

The Post‘s fact check gave Biden three Pinocchios due to his
imprecise language. The Trump administration sought access for CDC
experts, and the administration told the Post that Trump offered to
send experts to China to help with the outbreak. Biden also did not
specifically call for experts to be sent until late February.

Those weren't the only times Biden has been fact-checked for
rhetoric during the crisis.

On March 15, during the Democratic presidential debate, Biden
falsely claimed that Trump refused coronavirus testing kits from the
World Health Organization. The kits were never offered in the first
place. PolitiFact rated his statement "Mostly False." CNN, after
initially deeming his statement factual, retracted its rating after
a report by the Washington Free Beacon.

On March 19, Biden first tweeted that Trump "eliminated" the
pandemic response team. The Washington Post fact check found this
claim "overstated" due to the fact that the global health
directorate was folded into another office under the guidance of
former national security adviser John Bolton. Citing "dueling
narratives," however, it didn't give a rating to Biden's claim.


https://freebeacon.com/elections/biden-has-earned-11-pinocchios-
from-fact-checkers-during-coronavirus-crisis/