A new Trump campaign ad claims that President Donald Trump took “fast action” in regard to testing for the novel coronavirus. While “fast action” is subjective, pandemic experts say the U.S. did not move quickly to set up an adequate system and in fact lagged behind other countries.
The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that there are enough COVID-19 tests for states to begin reopening their economies. While that may be true for select locations, experts say more tests are needed, even if they don’t agree on a particular number.
Claims on social media have been spreading the falsehood that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention significantly lowered the COVID-19 death toll. There has been no such reduction. These claims confuse two different measures of the number of deaths.
Dismissing concerns that states are reopening too soon, President Donald Trump incorrectly said that a newly revised model projecting 134,000 COVID-19 deaths by August “assumes no mitigation.” In fact, the model assumes states will keep their existing social distancing measures in place, unless suspensions have already been announced.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly misstated the facts at the White House coronavirus briefings. In this video, we feature five examples from April.
A Trump campaign ad misleadingly edits a CNN interview to suggest 2 million people would have died from the novel coronavirus were it not for President Donald Trump’s China travel restrictions.
Despite early warnings about how damaging COVID-19 could be for Americans, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow defended his late February statement that the U.S. had “contained” the virus, saying on May 3 that the novel coronavirus “spread exponentially in ways that virtually no one could have predicted.”
Social media posts falsely claim that the CARES Act was introduced Jan. 24, 2019 to perpetuate the falsehood that the COVID-19 pandemic was planned or known about in advance. The CARES Act was introduced March 25 as a substitute amendment, replacing the title and language of an older, unrelated bill.
In this video, we show how President Donald Trump misquoted Dr. Anthony Fauci’s remarks in late February about the threat that the novel coronavirus posed for Americans.
President Donald Trump falsely claimed that his administration was not initially able to meet the increasing demand for ventilators to treat COVID-19 patients because “we weren’t left ventilators by a previous administration.”