Politics

Joe Biden’s Campaign Still Promoting Misleading Video After Fact-Checkers Debunked It

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Former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign has continued to promote a misleading video attacking President Donald Trump, even after fact-checkers debunked one of the video’s central claims.

In the video, which has more than 4 million views on YouTube, Biden campaign adviser Ron Klain falsely accuses the Trump administration of silencing career Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official Nancy Messonnier.

Klain said that Messonnier had been sidelined from briefing reporters after delivering a widely discussed warning about the virus’s impact on Americans’ lives.

“But Klain’s framing of the Messonnier situation is simply wrong,” The Washington Post noted in a fact-check, pointing out that Messonnier continued briefing reporters for weeks after the statement in question. The Post awarded four out of four Pinocchios to the Biden campaign’s false claim.

Biden’s campaign has continued to promote the inaccurate video anyway.

“Former White House Ebola Response Coordinator, Ron Klain, made a video with our campaign to break down how we got here and where we can go from here,” the campaign told supporters in an email Thursday.

“The video has over 4 million views and counting and you can watch it here,” the email continued, linking supporters to a fundraising page with the video embedded.

Biden and his campaign, which didn’t return a request for comment, have pushed several coronavirus-related falsehoods to attack the federal government’s response to the coronavirus.

Another campaign video that racked up millions of views spread the false claim that Trump referred to the virus as a “hoax” at his Feb. 28 campaign rally in South Carolina. The video misleadingly spliced together Trump saying “coronavirus” followed by, “this is their new hoax.”

In reality, Trump said that Democrats’ political reaction to the virus was a “hoax.”

“The video makes it seem like Trump is calling the disease itself a hoax, which he hasn’t done. The words are Trump’s, but the editing is Biden’s,” PolitiFact noted, rating the claim “false.”

Biden falsely said during the March 15 Democratic debate that Trump rejected coronavirus tests from the World Health Organization (WHO).

“The World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them,” the former vice president said. But that wasn’t true.

“The WHO never offered to sell test kits to the United States,” PolitiFact said in its fact-check of Biden’s comments.