Facing rock-bottom expectations, Joe Biden took to the stage on the final night of the Democratic National Convention to formally accept his nomination as the candidate hoping to unseat Donald Trump in November. Unsurprisingly, Biden repeatedly referenced the “return to normalcy” theme of his campaign, offering himself as an alternative to the Left’s perception of Trump. As a Trojan horse for the radical Left with Kamala Harris waiting impatiently in the wings, Biden is unable to maintain the false facade of “moderation” by discussing policy positions in detail. This leaves him with two options: honesty or distraction. COVID-19 is the Democrat’s preferred topic of distraction.
Applying their mantra of “never waste a good crisis,” the Democrats have been working overtime to spin the staggering impact of COVID-19 — both the health and economic impact — to be the result of Trump’s supposed ineptitude. During his speech, Biden made repeated jabs along this line of attack. He claimed that “science” was on the ballot, that the United States has “by far the worst performance of any nation on earth,” and that his “first step” will be to “get control of the virus.”
On a shallow level, Biden contradicted his own narrative by scoffing at the notion that the virus could recede, saying, “No miracle is coming. We lead the world in confirmed cases. We lead the world in deaths,” and then outlining the structure of his promised miracle cure:
“If I’m your president, on day one we’ll implement the national strategy I’ve been laying out since March. We’ll develop and deploy rapid tests with results available immediately. We’ll make the medical supplies and protective equipment that our country needs. We’ll make them here in America so we will never again be at the mercy of China or other foreign countries in order to protect our own people. We’ll make sure our schools have the resources they need to be open, safe and effective. We’ll put politics aside. We’ll take the muzzle off our experts so that the public gets the information they need and deserve…We’ll have a national mandate to wear a mask not as a burden but as a patriotic duty to protect one another.”
On a deeper level, the problem for Biden is that his promise to save the entire country from COVID-19 and/or Donald Trump hinges on lies, plagiarism, and a complete ignorance of Biden’s failure to address the last pandemic which hit American shores.
America is not the worst in the world
The concept of extreme American exceptionalism often cuts both ways. Patriotism sometimes leads to the dismissal of real issues or failures, while self-flagellation can result in the arrogantly insular exaggeration of one country’s problems over another. The Left’s reaction to COVID-19 is an example of the latter.
For the Democrats, sporadic patriotism mixed with a healthy daily dose of self-hatred is to be expected. Usually they focus on issues rooted in emotion and subjectivity, which are notoriously difficult to objectively debunk, but sometimes they attempt to take issues which exist solely in the realm of data and spin them to draw false conclusions. Their consistent and intentional misuse of mathematics is only possible with the support of their enablers — the mainstream media. However, it doesn’t take journalistic integrity or statistical genius to determine that Biden is, simply, lying.
According to John Hopkins University, the United States does have the highest number of reported COVID-19 cases and deaths in the world. Setting aside the laughable assumption that any of the data from China or Russia is reliable, Biden’s version of “USA Number One!” seems to be accurate. However, like so many of the Left’s statistical arguments, they are poorly constructed.
The United States has more than 5.5 million confirmed cases and 174,000 deaths due to COVID-19. Brazil comes in second with just over 112,000 deaths. Mexico has more than 59,000, India has almost 55,000, the United Kingdom has over 41,000 deaths, and Italy has over 35,000 deaths. Rudimentary math allows us to agree that 174,000 is certainly more than 112,000, and much more than 35,000!
Unfortunately for Biden, these raw numbers must be addressed in the context of population size. The United States has a population of approximately 330 million people according to United States Census Bureau data, while the United Kingdom has a population of almost 68 million, and Italy has a population of 60.5 million.
Using simple math, the reality is that the United States is far from the “worst” in the world when it comes to its handling of COVID-19. In the United States, there have been 53.26 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to 62.4 in the United Kingdom, and 58.61 in Italy. In fact, the United States isn’t even in the “Top 10,” with San Marino, Belgium, Peru, Andorra, Spain, Sweden, Chile, and Brazil ranking “higher.”
Biden claimed that “It’s not this bad in Canada or Europe or Japan or almost anywhere else in the world.” Maybe he should buy a map and learn math?
Biden’s hypothetical plan is either unconstitutional or Trump’s real plan
Biden’s miracle cure for COVID-19 is as follows: demonstrate a deep and irrelevant level of caring for the American populace, and then implement these policies:
- Rapid tests with immediate results.
- Make the medical supplies and protective equipment that our country needs in America, not China.
- Give schools the resources they need to be open, safe, and effective.
- Take the muzzle off our experts.
- Implement a national mask mandate.
The first claim regarding the importance of testing is simply a regurgitation of the policies proposed by the Trump administration. White House briefings have discussed the necessity of widespread testing, celebrating turnaround times of 15 minutes for results. Biden is effectively echoing the joke from “There’s Something About Mary” by claiming that “7-minute abs” will blow 8-minute abs “right out of the water.”
When it comes to the availability of supplies and equipment, Biden’s argument flies in the face of praise from state governors like Andrew Cuomo (when he’s been momentarily honest) who stated that Trump “delivered for New York.” When it comes to pushing for production to return to the United States from adversarial nations like China, Biden must explain why voters should dismiss Trump’s consistent criticism of China in favor of a candidate whose position on China is demonstrably incoherent and repeatedly contradictory.
When speaking of “silenced experts,” it is frankly absurd to claim that our “experts” have been muzzled by anything other than their occasionally-worn masks. Such a statement is based on the common argument that being criticized is synonymous with being “silenced.” While Trump has been openly critical at times of the medical community, his leading experts have been equally vocal. Some have even had the time to appear on magazine covers. If Biden believes that “unmuzzling” experts means shirking responsibility when it comes to policy, one must question why we need him as an executive in the first place.
Finally, Biden nodded to the authoritarian enthusiasts in the Democratic Party by calling for schools to be given the resources they need — despite the fact that education is primarily a state and local responsibility — and that masks should be required on a national scale — despite the fact that such an action is debatably unconstitutional and utterly impractical. Luckily for Democrats, constitutionality and practicality are mere bumps in the road of “progress.”
Biden, Obama, and H1N1
To believe that Biden and the Democrats will ride in on horseback to save us from this pandemic, we must successfully ignore the Democrats’ failure to handle a previous pandemic — the H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic of 2009. This pandemic lasted for 19 months between January 2009 and August 2010. According to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, the estimated global infection rate of H1N1 was between 11% and 21%, meaning that between 700 million and 1.4 billion people may have been infected. The World Health Organization reported 18,449 confirmed deaths, with the CDC estimating an actual death count in the range of 150,000 to 575,000 people. To provide perspective, COVID-19 has killed almost 800,000 people globally, with almost 23 million cases.
What are the differences between these two pandemics? In the United States, H1N1 infected an estimated 60.8 million people in its first year, while there are approximately 5 million cases of COVID-19. The mortality rate for COVID-19 is higher than H1N1, with H1N1 being less contagious. While the differences may be complex, if we apply the same simplicity of logic used by Biden and his speechwriters, surely we must conclude that Obama and Biden failed to “protect” the American populace by “allowing” millions of Americans to become infected.
The reason Biden and his contemporaries don’t reference their handling of H1N1 is solely because it was a matter of dumb luck that the Obama administration didn’t witness the damage we are seeing today as we face COVID-19. Biden’s own chief of staff during the H1N1 pandemic, Ron Klain, agreed with this conclusion, stating “It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck. If anyone thinks that this can’t happen again, they don’t have to go back to 1918, they just have to go back to 2009, 2010 and imagine a virus with a different lethality, and you can just do the math on that.”
Today, we are facing a virus with a different lethality, and Biden can’t do the math. In addition, the Obama administration even shut down H1N1 testing, with the CDC “abruptly” advising states to stop testing for H1N1 and cease counting individual cases in July 2009. The reasoning? “Why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there’s an epidemic?”
Joe Biden, as part of the Obama administration, has already experienced a pandemic. If we were to apply their strategy to COVID-19, the outcome would be no less disastrous than our current situation. The only difference would be the existence of a complicit media willing to cover for an incompetent administration, rather than one hellbent on pinning the blame for the failure of Democratic Governors on President Trump.
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Joe Biden is seen by his supporters as a caring and paternalistic figure who will save us from the “dark” of the Trump administration. It’s an act of journalistic failure that Biden and his party have the gall to claim to be the party of “science,” and Trump should make the subject of “science” central to his attacks on his opponents. After all, how can the “party of science” ever “save us” with a foundation of statistical lies, rehashed Republican policies, and deceitful historical revisionism?
Biden called for “honest, unvarnished truth,” and that we can “handle it.” If you believe Joe Biden, then you’re proving him wrong.
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