Biden’s Early Statements About the Coronavirus

President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden have made competing claims about Biden’s early statements on the coronavirus.

Following the disclosure of comments he made to journalist Bob Woodward in March about downplaying the coronavirus, Trump has tried to turn the tables on Biden, claiming it was Biden who maintained through late February that the coronavirus was “not even going to be a problem.” That’s not accurate.

The former vice president warned early about the potential danger posed by the virus, and about the need for a thoughtful response by the federal government. The “coronavirus is a serious public health challenge,” Biden said at a Feb. 28 campaign rally in South Carolina.

Conversely, Biden stretched the facts at a CNN town hall on Sept. 17, claiming that in January he wrote an op-ed “saying, we’ve got a pandemic. We’ve got a real problem.” The op-ed did not go that far.

We reviewed all of Biden’s public comments that we could find in early 2020 about the coronavirus. While some of his comments about the potential danger of the virus have proved prescient, Biden was not as far ahead of the curve as he sometimes makes it seem when it came to calls for deterrents like social distancing and wearing masks.

We start with one comment from Biden via Twitter from October 2019, before the coronavirus emerged.

We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores. https://t.co/1qqpgayUEX

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 25, 2019

That was more than a month before the earliest known instances of the disease occurred in early December in Wuhan, China, and more than two months before Chinese officials reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization on Dec. 31.

Sounding the Alarm

The first public statement that we found from Biden about the coronavirus came in an op-ed for USA Today on Jan. 27. In it, he warned about the “possibility of a pandemic,” writing that while there were only five confirmed cases in the U.S. at that time, “There will likely be more.”

Biden argued that “Trump’s demonstrated failures of judgment and his repeated rejection those proposed cuts).