Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden’s attempt to demonstrate to voters that he would be a more competent and trustworthy leader amid the COVID-19 crisis is not going over well, including with left-leaning fact-checkers.
The Biden campaign’s coronavirus informational video posted Saturday — part of Biden’s “shadow” COVID-19 briefings series — not only failed to feature the candidate himself, it needlessly worked in a claim about President Trump’s handling of the situation egregious enough that The Washington Post felt compelled to weigh in on it. The result was Biden’s team getting slapped with four Pinocchios.
On Saturday, Biden tweeted out an informational video hosted by Ron Klain, the Obama administration’s Ebola outbreak response coordinator, which quickly went viral (below). Among the claims made by Klain was that Trump supposedly “silenced” officials who “raised an alarm” about the threat of COVID-19, including Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease:
Klain: All the while, anyone who raised an alarm about this — a red flag — was silenced. Look no further than Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a career official at the Centers for Disease Control who was the first to raise the alarm. … Starting the next day, Dr. Messonnier no longer appeared at public briefings of the White House coronavirus task force. 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.
Everyone knows that we're facing a real crisis from the coronavirus. But do you know how we got here and what we need to do next? Ron Klain, former White House Ebola Response Coordinator, breaks it down for us: pic.twitter.com/XRkIw2EzM4
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 21, 2020
But as Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler puts it, “Klain’s framing of the Messonnier situation is simply wrong.” Trump was indeed reportedly upset by Messonnier’s public statements, but there’s simply no evidence that he tried to “silence” her or other officials in any way.
During a Feb. 25 phone briefing, Messonnier warned, “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness.” She went on to suggest we would experience “significant disruption of our lives” and potential “school dismissals or school closures” in the U.S.
The Post was among the outlets that initially reported on Trump’s response to Messonnier’s statements:
On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, a senior CDC official, sounded perhaps the most significant public alarm to that point, when she told reporters that the coronavirus was likely to spread within communities in the United States and that disruptions to daily life could be “severe.” Trump called [Health and Humans Services Sec. Alex Azar] on his way back from a trip to India and complained that Messonnier was scaring the stock markets, according to two senior administration officials.”
But did Trump then try to “silence” her? Kessler says that claim is baseless. Kessler describes how Biden’s video so deceptively frames the situation:
In the Biden video, Klain claims there was immediate blowback: “Starting the next day, Dr. Messonnier no longer appeared at public briefings of the White House coronavirus task force. 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.” The video imposes question marks over the heads of the people appearing onstage with Trump on Feb. 26.
But if you look closely, you will see there is a woman standing next to Trump. Who’s that? Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director — and Messonnier’s superior.
Schuchat, Kessler explains, had delivered, just one day before, almost the identical message as Messonnier, saying in a coronavirus task force news conference: “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen, and how many people in this country will become infected? And how many of those will develop severe or more complicated disease?”
“[F]ar from being silenced, Messonnier kept doing her telephone briefings with reporters — on Feb. 28, Feb. 29, March 3 and March 9,” Kessler writes. “She also appeared in four videos shared on social media, such as this one from March 14.”
In other words, those who “raised alarms” were not “silenced,” rather presented by the administration as authoritative voices and allowed to continue to provide information to the public, including information that was “alarming.” When Trump appointed Vice President Mike Pence to take over the coronavirus task force, even more senior people were featured, and they likewise at times presented troubling information.
“Messonnier’s remarks on Feb. 25 may have caught the attention of Wall Street and caused angst in the White House. But we cannot find evidence of her being immediately silenced, as Klain claims in the video,” Kessler concludes. (Read the full fact-check here.)