Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders stunned many viewers during their one-on-one presidential primary debate Sunday night as they made a series of verbal gaffes in their plans to handle the Coronavirus outbreak.
Sanders erroneously identified the Coronavirus outbreak as the “Ebola crisis” twice. The senator later tried to excuse his flub by saying he’d “got Ebola in my head,” because the topic had come up earlier in the debate.
Not to be outdone Biden mixed up the Coronavirus pandemic with SARS and H1N1. Biden’s gaffe is more likely to come back to haunt him if he faces President Trump in the general election. Biden confused the coronavirus repeatedly with swine flu, sparked by the H1N1 virus. As though that mistake wasn’t enough, Biden identified that virus as N1H1.
That mistake shined the light on President Trump’s attacks on Biden’s handling of the swine flu pandemic in 2009. Trump tweeted on March 12, “Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record.”
Fox News gave credence to that narrative by reporting, “According to the CDC, between 2009 and 2010, swine flu resulted in over 60 million U.S. cases, and more than 12,000 deaths. It remains unclear at this stage how the novel coronavirus will compare.”
Watch the video as Saagar Enjeti of The Hill.tv reveals how the Obama White House had to rebuke its own Vice President during the Swine Flu crisis of 2007.
