Biden’s Failed Pandemic Track Record

Left Strategic National Stockpile empty; halted testing

Posted on Jul 20, 2020

Joe Biden has spent a lot of time remarking (from his basement, mostly) that the Obama-Biden administration left President Trump a playbook for handling the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic.

Unfortunately, Biden appears to have forgotten the facts on this. Here’s what history tells us about the Obama-Biden pandemic response that Joe Biden likes to tout:

  • The Obama-Biden administration left the Strategic National Stockpile dangerously short of PPE like N-95 respirator masks after using nearly all of them to combat the swine flu. The Obama-Biden admin did not replenish our national stockpile, despite experts calling on them to do so. Unsurprisingly, Biden has refused to explain this page of his so-called playbook or accept responsibility.
  • The Obama-Biden administration abruptly ended all swine flu-testing in the middle of the pandemic without providing any explanation to states. CBS reports:
    • “The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there’s an epidemic? Some public health officials privately disagreed with the decision to stop testing and counting, telling CBS News that continued tracking of this new and possibly changing virus was important[.]”
  • Last but certainly not least, the Obama-Biden administration totally botched the deployment of a swine flu vaccine, after making mistakes that delayed production and created supply shortages.

Biden’s “playbook” for coronavirus response is an unmitigated disaster that could have cost the lives of millions of Americans if used as precedent for coronavirus response. As  Dr. Birx described, President Trump had to completely overhaul the regulatory mess left by the Obama-Biden admin to combat the global coronavirus pandemic. Biden’s own former chief of staff and current health advisor said in 2019 that they did “every possible thing wrong” when combating the 2009 swine flu. “It is purely a fortuity,” he admitted, “that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history.”

The timeline of President Trump’s coronavirus response debunks Biden’s claims that he sounded the alarms before anyone else. The media has yet to hold Biden to any standard of accountability for his flagrantly false claims concerning his “playbook” or previous pandemic response. One thing is clear, the record shows Biden’s playbook is a failure.