More than one million Americans have died from COVID-19, the CDC announced on Monday, some 18 months after then-candidate Joe Biden promised to "shut down the virus" as president.
A significant majority of those deaths—nearly 600,000 since January 20, 2021—occurred on Biden's watch. According to his own logic, the president should have resigned a long time ago. During the final presidential debate against Trump in October 2020, Biden argued that any leader who presided over more than 200,000 deaths from COVID-19 "should not remain as president of the United States of America."
In the final days of the 2020 election, Biden made a promise to the American people. "I'm not going to shut down the economy," he wrote on Twitter, the popular social networking website. "I'm going to shut down the virus."
FACT CHECK: Mostly false. Biden did not shut down the virus, which originated in China. Almost 200,000 more Americans died from COVID on his watch than died under former president Donald Trump. The U.S. economy is slouching toward recession.
Having failed to meaningfully improve the lives of ordinary Americans, the Biden administration has resorted to blatant lies. Last week, for example, the White House's official Twitter account falsely claimed "there was no [COVID] vaccine available" when Biden took office. The first COVID vaccines were approved for emergency use in December 2020. Biden himself had received two doses of the vaccine by the time he was sworn in as president.
COVID, sometimes referred to as "Biden's China virus," continues to spread, primarily due to the hubris and narcissism of Democratic politicians and their allies in the media. Vice President Kamala Harris contracted COVID in late April after violating health and safety protocols to celebrate the "emotional" and "historic" confirmation of incoming Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Numerous journalists and administration officials tested positive for COVID after attending the White House Correspondents' Dinner, an egregious spectacle of decadence during which Biden and others mingled with celebrities and laughed at jokes about the rampant inflation wreaking havoc on the lives of hardworking Americans.
The virus has not stopped Democrats from attending parties and fundraisers, but they keep citing it as an excuse to avoid showing up for work at their taxpayer-funded offices. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) announced last week that Democrats could "vote from home" for another six weeks.
Pelosi's announcement came more than two and half months after Biden's State of the Union address, in which he declared that "people working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office."