A pair of CNN anchors issued a brutal fact-check to President Donald Trump on Wednesday over his claims that more people died from COVID-19 under the Biden administration than in his first term.
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Trump has repeatedly blamed the Biden administration for the number of deaths that were caused by the pandemic, although political analysts and experts have pointed out that Trump was one of the leading proponents of misinformation about the virus.
“That is factually correct in terms of raw numbers, but there’s important context missing there,” CNN’s Boris Sanchez said on “CNN News Central” about the president’s COVID-19 death claim. “The outbreak happened with less than a year of President Trump’s first term, with less than a year of him still in office. Vaccines were not deployed until December of 2020. Notably, President Biden had to deal with several waves of coronavirus, Delta and Omicron.”
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Altogether, more than 1 million people died in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Brianna Keilar added that Trump’s claim was “misleading at best.”
“These numbers have been politicized over and over again,” Keilar noted. “Trump’s claim there is certainly misleading. It is of note that death rates were actually higher in some areas that were pro-Trump, where there was some reticence about vaccines.”
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