Joe Biden recently claimed that tens of thousands of more lives would have been saved form the COVID 19 virus, if the country had shut down earlier and we only listened to him.
“This COVID epidemic has basically shut down the country in the last three months. And by the way, if we shut it down a month earlier, we'd have probably another 45 to 60 thousand people be alive, instead of dead because he didn't listen to - and I'm going to say some outrageous- he didn’t listen to guys like me back in January saying we have a problem,” Biden said Monday at an event in Wilmington Delaware.
MRCTV searched through the many close-quartered campaign events Biden held throughout January, and could find no record of a call to “shut down” the country.
The first coronavirus related item that could be located is a Jan. 27 USA Today op-ed, where Biden had accused Trump of proposing cuts to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As Statesman.com noted, “That’s accurate to a point, but Congress restored that funding and even increased it. Trump ultimately signed that legislation — a point that Biden omitted from his op-ed.”
The self-proclaimed non-partisan website procon.org also notes the Jan. 27th op-ed as the first time Biden commented on Coronavirus.
At a campaign event on January 31, Biden responded to the Trump administration's restriction on travel from China to the U.S. "We have, right now, a crisis with the Coronavirus. This is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysteria and xenophobia - hysterical xenophobia - and fear mongering to lead the way instead of science," Biden said. But he never called for a “shut down."
It seems Biden may be right about at least one thing he said on Monday – he said some “outrageous” things.