By Sandy Fitzgerald(NEWSMAX)
If Joe Biden had been in charge of handling the coronavirus pandemic, “from 2-3 million people would have died” if he handled it “like he did the swine flu,” President Donald Trump claimed Monday.
“We’re rounding the corner on the pandemic, and we’ve done a phenomenal job, not just a good job,” Trump said on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.”
Other than with “public relations,” Trump said the White House response has been an “A-plus,” but that Biden’s handling of the swine flu, or the H1N1 virus, was “a disaster. And the person who ran it admitted that they didn’t know what they were doing. Maybe he was honest. It was a total disaster.”
H1N1 was “a flu” and was “a much less lethal situation but it was handled so badly,” said Trump. “They lost thousands and thousands of people, and they agreed that they handled it badly. Now (Biden’s) telling us how to handle this. We don’t need his advice. We don’t really want his advice.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were an estimated 60.8 million cases of the H1N1 virus reported in the United States, resulting in 274,304 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths during the H1N1 virus pandemic from April 12, 2009, to April 10, 2010.
In comparison, there have been 6.8 million cases of COVID-19 reported in the United States and 199,552 deaths from it since March, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
Meanwhile, Trump said he would say there will be a COVID-19 vaccine before the end of this year and “maybe by the end of October.”
“Pfizer’s doing really well,” he said. “Johnson & Johnson has an incredible vaccine that’s doing well, that’ll probably be a little later. Moderna’s doing very well.”
“If this were (Barack) Obama and Biden, they wouldn’t have this vaccine for another two and a half years because they wouldn’t have been able to go through the process of the FDA,” said Trump. “What I did with the FDA was very good, and we speeded the process up to a point where we’re going to have them in a matter of weeks.”
He also said China mishandled the spread of the disease and defended his order to restrict travel from there earlier this year.
