by Peter Hasson
Former Vice President Joe Biden has repeatedly inflated America’s coronavirus death toll by hundreds of thousands and millions of deaths when talking about the virus.
Biden gaffed on Thursday, saying that “over 120 million” people were “dead from COVID” before correcting himself. Biden has struggled to get right the number of coronavirus deaths, which is at roughly 121,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In a May 1 interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Biden placed the number of coronavirus deaths at greater than 600,000.
“Look Joe, over 600,000 dead. Many of them are people who are those, those, those workers, those nurses, doctors some of them, because they put themselves in a position to save other people’s lives, protect the rest of society. And we talk about that number, like 600,000-plus people … ” Biden said.
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough corrected him, noting that the real number at the time was one-tenth the size at 60,000.
In a May 14 livestream with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden appeared to place the number of deaths in the millions, saying the pandemic “has cost us more than 85,000 jobs as of today, lives of millions of people, millions of people, millions of jobs.”
Biden continued on without correcting himself.
Biden avoided botching the number in a May 21 interview with a local Florida station by looking at his notes before answering the question.
Biden and his campaign have repeatedly spread inaccurate information relating to the virus.
A misleading March 31 Biden campaign video made it seem as if President Donald Trump had called the virus a “hoax.” In reality, Trump said that Democrats’ political reaction to the virus was a “hoax.”
“The video makes it seem like Trump is calling the disease itself a hoax, which he hasn’t done. The words are Trump’s, but the editing is Biden’s,” PolitiFact noted, rating the claim “false.”
Another Biden campaign video falsely accused Trump of silencing a career CDC official who warned the public about the coronavirus. A fact check from The Washington Post awarded the claim four out of four Pinocchios.
The Biden campaign didn’t return an email seeking comment for this article.
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Peter Hasson is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
