Vice President Mike Pence is leading a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he told a whopper of a lie amid the pandemic. Pence touted the progress the Trump administration has made, and said, “The truth is, we did slow the spread. We flattened the curve. We were able to stand up the resources and the capacities in our health care system to be able to meet this coronavirus.”
Well, Mike, the first lie you told was when you said, “The truth is.”
Watch:
Pence claims “we flattened the curve,” which is no longer true — the trajectory of new US cases is now rising again pic.twitter.com/KrdmQ8A3W1
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 26, 2020
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Pence also said there “may be a tendency” among Americans to think “we’re in a time of great losses and great hardship on the American people” like we were two months ago, but in reality, “we’re in a much better place.”
The vice president said, “We can still take some comfort in the fact that fatalities are declining all across the country.”
CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checked that claim:
Pence: “We can still take some comfort in the fact that fatalities are declining all across the country.” (They are not declining literally everywhere in the country, though the national number is down from the peak.)
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 26, 2020
There is a lot to unpack there. More than one hundred twenty-six thousand Americans are now dead from COVID-19, so we are not in a “much better place.” The current occupant of the White House has been eager to reopen states. Let’s look at Florida, which reported on Friday nearly nine thousand new coronavirus cases in just twenty-four hours.
“Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is recording as many as 2,000 cases a day, “eclipsing the New York City boroughs even on their worst days,” the Washington Post reports about the situation in Arizona. That just happens to be the same area that Trump recently visited so he could hold an ego-rally.
The coronavirus curve is not flattened, and that sort of egregious lie is dangerous, but it’s all too common with this administration.
Featured image via screen capture
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