Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is pointing his finger at who he believes is responsible for the deaths caused in the U.S. due to COVID-19.
With over 197,000 deaths due to the virus, as of Friday morning, the former vice president placed blame on President Donald Trump during a CNN town hall on Thursday evening.
“If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive,” Biden said at the town hall in Pennsylvania.
He continued, “All the people. I’m not making this up. Just look at the data. Look at the data.”
However, news outlets pushed back on Biden’s claim, including The Washington Post, who wrote, “Actually, Biden is making this up. There is no data to support this, even if the president had moved rapidly in January to deal with the coronavirus and been able to persuade the Chinese leadership to be more forthcoming about the situation.”
The Post also notes that even countries that have been praised for their coronavirus response have had deaths due to the virus.
Watch the video below:
Biden claims Trump is responsible for every single person who has died from COVID-19:
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 18, 2020
"If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive. All the people — I’m not making this up. Just look at the data. Look at the data." pic.twitter.com/Z6tkk9NzHi
During the town hall, Biden also called on Trump to step down due to the president’s coronavirus response, as IJR reported.
After claiming that Trump’s response to the pandemic is “all about one thing, the stock market” as well as his reelection, Biden said, “There’s not been a time they’ve not been able to step up. The president should step down.”
Trump recently came under fire from Democratic leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), after the president blamed Democratic states for the coronavirus death toll.
After mentioning initial predictions for the coronavirus death toll in the U.S., Trump said at a news briefing Wednesday, “If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed.”
Schumer called Trump’s remarks “so callous, so uninformed, so egomaniacal, so divisive” and said he felt “compelled to respond.”
“If you close your eyes and pretend that half the country doesn’t exist, maybe some might think you didn’t do such a spectacularly awful job,” the Democratic lawmaker said on the Senate floor Thursday.
He asked, “What kind of person looks at the number of dead citizens in the country he is supposed to lead, and in an attempt to glamorize himself dismisses every American who died in a state that didn’t support the president politically.”
Schumer added, “What a disgrace, it’s monstrous. What kind of demented person would say that those Americans live don’t count?”