White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany demanded a fact on Twitter Tuesday after a video clip of her discussing former President Barack Obama’s handling of the swine flu epidemic was interpreted to mean that she was criticizing the past management of the COVID-19 outbreak.
“This is a blatant lie,” McEnany tweeted in reaction to Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who shared a tweet with the truncated video, taken from an interview with Fox News. In their tweet, Tribe wrote: “@PressSec says Obama and Biden ‘promised a vaccine’ for Covid-19 in 2016? Even though Covid-19 first made the impression in 2020? Wut?”
McEnany shared a longer edit of the video “where I obviously mention swine flu and the failure of the Obama / Biden response. “
“Will @Twitter the facts?” She asked.
In the longest clip, McEnany praises President Donald Trump’s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic and says “Fox & Friends” Trump hosts have damaged bureaucratic barriers so we can get a safe, effective, and timely vaccine. “.
“And again, compare that to Obama-Biden where they promised a vaccine, performed much lower, and Biden’s adviser, in the Obama-Biden era, says it’s a natural miracle, fortunately swine flu is not a massive turn of fate of our time,” he says.
The shortened 12-second clip was interrupted after McEnany declared himself “Biden’s advisor”. This edition had 2. 6 million prospects on Wednesday morning.
Tribe was not the top-profile Twitter user as a percentage of the video.
“The virus did exist, did the interviewer mention it?” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin asked.
“The point of mendacity is to be expected. The point of combination with the lie sets a new low for Kayleigh,” wrote Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
McEnany’s complaint to the Obama administration about swine flu echoes what Trump has continually criticized, with fact-checkers questioning the veracity of the president’s claims.
On a tweet Thursday, Trump said Biden had done “a terrible task in a much bigger situation” than the COVID-19 outbreak. “OBiden’s address has failed in this area,” he added.
The swine flu, or H1N1 virus, struck the United States in April 2009, just 3 months after Obama took office. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that about 12,500 more people in the United States died of swine flu in 12 months. The coronavirus killed about 190,000 Americans in about six months.
In May 2019, former president Joe Biden’s former staff leader Ron Klain said at a biosecurity convention that the Obama administration had “a lot of talented and wonderful people running in” the swine flu response “and we did everything wrong. “
Klain said it was “pure coincidence” that the swine flu epidemic was not “one of the most vital occasions in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing something. A smart thing. It just had to do with luck”.
Klain, who has touted Biden as more capable of taking over the existing pandemic than Trump, told Politico this year that the comments were only about the disruptions the administration faced by offering enough doses of the vaccine to respond. Demand. He said the Obama team would have responded better to the up disorders facing Trump’s management, such as a shortage of protective equipment. And he said they would have passed more on to public fitness experts.
Fact Check: Was the 2009 swine flu reaction a “disaster” as President Trump put it?
Despite McEnany and Trump’s complaint about the Obama administration’s response, many experts have given the government top marks for its handling of swine flu.
A 2012 social and fitness investigation into the federal government’s reaction recognized “success” and “opportunities for improvement” in its reaction to the outbreak. The report praised the immediate progression of vaccines, but criticized the rate at which doses reached the public.
The Food and Drug Administration approved 4 vaccines in September 2009. But the HHS report found that “even though the six-month targets for initial delivery of the vaccine were met, the maximum number of vaccines came too late because they immunized a giant component of the public before pandemic spikes “due to” delays in production and delivery. “
Although it came before the peak number of infections, 80 million Americans were vaccinated in 4 months, according to the report.
In 2010, Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, told the New York Times that federal officials obtained “at least one B-plus” for their reaction. Peter Palese, virologist at Mount Sinai Medical School, told The Times that the overall federal reaction was “excellent. “