Fact check: A list of false claims from Trump's bitter coronavirus briefing

[riversedge]

Fact check: A list of false claims from Trump's bitter coronavirus briefing

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/13/politics/fact-check-coronavirus-briefing-april-13/index.html?iid=ob_lockedrail_topeditorial

By Daniel Dale, Em Steck, Maegan Vazquez, Tara Subramaniam and David Wright, CNN

Updated 1213 GMT (2013 HKT) April 14, 2020


Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump delivered another litany of false and misleading claims on Monday at a White House coronavirus briefing during which he repeatedly accused the media of dishonesty.

Trump delivered an indignant screed about claims that he was slow in responding to the coronavirus outbreak, repeatedly citing the travel restrictions on China he announced in late January and began in early February. Yet his defense did not address his public downplaying of the virus into March, how his administration was slow to deploy the tests experts believe might have helped contain the outbreak, or how the administration waited critical weeks to make large orders of critical equipment.

Trump also falsely claimed he has "total" authority over states' coronavirus restrictions, falsely claimed he had inherited broken coronavirus tests, falsely claimed presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden apologized for having called him xenophobic, falsely claimed that governors have stopped talking about a need for ventilators, and falsely claimed he banned travel from Europe.

Here's our preliminary rundown of his claims and the facts that go with them. This will be updated throughout the night.

Fact checking a portion of the White House video presentation
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Coronavirus testing

At Monday's briefing, Trump implied that he had inherited flawed coronavirus tests from President Barack Obama's administration.
"We literally rebuilt tests -- we rebuilt a whole industry because we inherited nothing," Trump said. "What we inherited from the previous administration was totally broken, which somebody should eventually say. Not only were the cupboards bare, as I say, but we inherited broken testing. Now we have great testing."

Facts First: Since this is a new virus that was first identified this year, the tests for it are newly created, not inherited from the Obama administration. The faulty initial test for the coronavirus was created during Trump's administration, in early 2020, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The claim "doesn't make sense because it is false," Tara Smith, an epidemiology professor at Kent State University, said of a previous version of Trump's claim. "This a new virus."

"He is lying. He is lying 100%. He is lying because he is trying to shift blame to others, even if the attempt is totally nonsensical," Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, said of a previous version of the claim.

Trump has made versions of this claim on multiple occasions, shifting his rhetoric over time from a broader and more debatable claim that the testing "system" was flawed. While his Monday claim about having inherited "broken testing" is slightly vaguer than his claims about having inherited faulty or obsolete "tests," it creates the same impression.

You can read more here about the President's various claims on inheriting tests. .......................