President Donald Trump blasted former Vice President Joe Biden’s handling of the swine flu epidemic, calling it a “total disaster.”
Trump’s comments came in a tweet Tuesday morning. He wrote: “Joe Biden’s handling of the H1N1 Swine Flu was a complete and total disaster. Even polls on the matter were terrible!”
The Obama administration’s response to the H1N1 virus in 2009 was bungled with contradictory messages, a shortage of vaccines and fights over funding, according to Politico.
Over the course of a year, the H1N1 flu infected 60 million Americans, but there were only 12,469 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time, said of H1N1 in 2019 at a biosecurity summit. “It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck.”
Klain told Politico his comments at the summit referred only to the Obama administration’s challenges in providing enough H1N1 vaccines.
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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