Biden’s Greatest Hits
As the Democratic National Convention kicks off today, we thought it would be helpful to highlight some of the claims we have fact-checked from presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden over the course of the campaign so far.
For more on each statement, follow the links to our full stories. All of our articles on Biden can be found here.
Next week, when the Republican convention begins, we will present a similar compilation of claims we have checked from President Donald Trump.
Claims are grouped by subject.
COVID-19
Biden falsely accused Trump of being late in imposing travel restrictions on China. In fact, the United States was not late getting off the mark compared with other countries around the world.
On ABC’s “This Week” on April 5, Biden said “45 nations had already moved” to restrict travel from China “before the president moved.” Said Biden, “We started off awfully slow.”
Think Global Health, a project of the Council on Foreign Relations, tracked the travel restrictions on China due to COVID-19. Its country-by-country analysis shows that in the days after the World Health Organization on Jan. 30 declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, 36 countries imposed travel restrictions, including the U.S., by Feb. 2. “What this data shows is that the United States was neither behind nor ahead of the curve in terms of imposing travel restrictions against China,” a co-author of the tracker, Samantha Kiernan, a research associate on global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us via email.
“Trump, Biden Spin China Travel Restrictions,” April 6, 2020
Biden was wrong when he said that the Trump administration made “no effort” to get U.S. medical experts into China as the novel coronavirus epidemic spread there early this year. “[W]hen we were talking … early on in this crisis, we said — I said, among others, that, you know, you should get into China, get our experts there, we have the best in the world, get them in so we know what’s actually happening,” Biden said at a CNNon March 27. “There was no effort
