By Matt Margolis
During his virtual grassroots fundraiser on Tuesday, Barack Obama falsely claimed that the 2009 swine flu (H1N1) wasn’t a pandemic at all, and tried to take credit for it not becoming one. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, who looked like he was just trying to stay awake, just sat there and nodded as if it were true.
Below you can watch the clip of Barack Obama lying when he stated, “…and dealing with issues like H1N1 that we feared could be a pandemic if it wasn’t handled properly…”
Barack Obama lies about H1N1, says it wasn’t a pandemic. pic.twitter.com/DQBn9vLpra
— Matt Margolis 🇺🇸 (@mattmargolis) June 24, 2020
For starters, H1N1 was classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on June 11, 2009. Two weeks later, the CDC estimated there were at least 1 million cases in the United States. So, where Obama got the notion that it wasn’t a pandemic is beyond comprehension.
The CDC estimates that in the United States alone there were nearly 61 million cases of H1N1, 274,304 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths between April 12, 2009, and April 10, 2010.
Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time and is currently advising his campaign, says it was mere luck that H1N1 wasn’t more deadly.
“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Klain said of H1N1 in 2019. “It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck. If anyone thinks that this can’t happen again, they don’t have to go back to 1918, they just have to go back to 2009, 2010, and imagine a virus with a different lethality, and you can just do the math on that.”