Vice President Joe Biden lied to the American people about Coronavirus during Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate–apparently, in an effort to smear President Trump.
During the debate, Biden claimed that President Trump had turned down Coronavirus test kits from the World Health Organization.
“Look, the World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now,” Biden said. “We refused them. We did not want to buy them. We did not want to get them from them. We wanted to make sure we had our own,” Biden said.
Unfortunately for Biden, that never happened. PolitiFact declared Biden’s claim “Mostly False.”
According to PolitiFact, the only part of Biden’s statement that was true was that the WHO did send out Coronavirus test kits to nearly 60 countries at the end of February, and that the U.S. did not make the list.
But Biden lied about everything else–including, critically, the reason why the U.S. didn’t receive Coronavirus tests.
Far from President Trump kicking the WHO gift horse in the mouth, the United States was never slated to receive the tests in the first place–because the WHO generally only gives medical supplies to countries that lack the technology to develop them on their own.
Simply put: poorer countries receive medical aid from the WHO. The United States, with one of the most advanced healthcare systems on the planet, does not.
The WHO was quick to shoot down Biden’s lies as well.
“No discussions occurred between WHO and CDC about WHO providing COVID-19 tests to the United States,” said WHO spokesperson, Margaret Harris. “This is consistent with experience since the United States does not ordinarily rely on WHO for reagents or diagnostic tests because of sufficient domestic capacity.”
Harris also asserted that the WHO’s main priority was to distribute testing kits to “countries with the weakest health systems,” rather than advanced, developed democracies like the United States.