Fact check: A list of 28 ways President Trump and his team have been dishonest about the coronavirus
By Daniel Dale and Tara Subramaniam | CNN
President Donald Trump has been comprehensively misinforming the public about the coronavirus.
Trump has littered his public remarks on the life-and-death subject
with false, misleading and dubious claims. And he has been joined, on
occasion, by senior members of his administration.
We’ve counted 28 different ways the President and his team have been
inaccurate. Here is a chronological list, which may be updated as
additional misinformation comes to our attention.
February 10: Trump says without evidence that the coronavirus “dies with the hotter weather”
Trump said on Fox Business: “You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather.” He told state governors:
“You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat —
as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.” And he said
at a campaign rally: “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it
gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. I hope that’s true.”
Facts First: Experts were not saying this. They
were saying, rather, that it was too soon to know how the coronavirus
would respond to changing weather. “It would be reckless to assume that
things will quiet down in spring and summer,” Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of
the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of
Medicine in Texas, told CNN. “We don’t really understand the basis of
seasonality, and of course we know we absolutely nothing about this
particular virus.” You can read a longer analysis here.
February 24: Trump baselessly claims the situation is “under control”
Trump tweeted: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”
Facts First: “Under control” is subjective, but
by any reasonable definition, the coronavirus was not under control in
the US — and there was no way for the government to fully understand how
dire the problem was given how few Americans were being tested. There
were 53 confirmed cases and no deaths on the day of Trump’s tweet; as of
March 11, there were more than 1,000 cases and 31 deaths.
February 25: A senior White House official falsely claims the virus has been “contained”
White House National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow said, “We have contained this, I won’t say airtight but pretty close to airtight.” Kudlow said again
on March 6 that the coronavirus “is contained” in the US. Counselor to
the President Kellyanne Conway made similar though less definitive
comments the same day, saying the virus “is being contained.”
Facts First: Experts said the US has not come
close to containing the coronavirus. They also said the small number of
tests conducted in the United States had prevented the government from
getting an accurate picture of how widespread the virus truly is.
“In the US it is the opposite of contained,” said Harvard University
epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard’s Center for
Communicable Disease Dynamics. “It is spreading so efficiently in so
many places that it may be difficult to stop.”
February 25: Trump falsely claims Ebola mortality was “a virtual 100%”
In comments to journalists on both February 25 and February 26,
Trump contrasted the fatality rate for the coronavirus with the
fatality rate for the Ebola outbreak of 2014 to 2016, saying “in the
other case (Ebola), it was a virtual 100%” and that “with Ebola — we
were talking about it before — you disintegrated. If you got Ebola, that
was it.”
Facts First: While the Ebola outbreak of 2014 to
2016 certainly had a much higher death rate than the coronavirus, the
Ebola rate was never “virtually 100%”; for the entire epidemic, it was
about 40% overall in the three African countries at the center of the
situation. It was higher in the early stages of the outbreak, but it was
never true that every infected person “disintegrated.”
There were 28,616 “suspected, probable, and confirmed cases” and 11,310 deaths in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As of mid-September 2014, World Health Organization (WHO) researchers reported
that there was an estimated fatality rate of 70.8%. But the rate “fell
later in the epidemic with lessons learned in improving treatment,” said
Julie Fischer, associate research professor in the Department of
Microbiology and Immunology at Georgetown University and director of the
Elizabeth R. Griffin Program. Still, even at 70.8%, death was never
guaranteed for infected people, as Trump suggested.
“It was never 100%. That is just patently untrue,” Fischer said.
February 25: Trump falsely claims “nobody had ever even heard of Ebola” in 2014
Comparing the coronavirus outbreak with the Ebola situation of 2014, Trump said, “At that time, nobody had ever even heard of Ebola.”
Facts First: Some Americans certainly didn’t
know a whole lot about Ebola before 2014, but the claims that “nobody”
had ever even heard of Ebola and that “nobody” knew anything about it
are absurd. Ebola was discovered in 1976. It had been the subject of considerable media coverage in the next three decades, not to mention scientific study.
February 26: Trump wrongly says the coronavirus “is a flu”
Trump, contrasting the coronavirus with Ebola, said: “This is a flu. This is like a flu.”
Facts First: While Trump may have simply meant
that the coronavirus has a fatality rate more like the flu than like
Ebola, experts have emphasized that the coronavirus is, simply, not the
flu. They are different viruses with different characteristics, though they share symptoms, and the coronavirus has a higher mortality rate.
Experts say the mortality rate for the coronavirus is much higher
than the approximately 0.1% rate for the seasonal flu, though the exact
rate for the coronavirus is not yet known. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director
of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told
Congress on March 11 that it is “10 times” that of the flu’s 0.1%.
As World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said
March 3, the coronavirus “causes more severe disease than seasonal
influenza. While many people globally have built up immunity to seasonal
flu strains, COVID-19 is a new virus to which no one has immunity. That
means more people are susceptible to infection, and some will suffer
severe disease.”
Also, the behavior of the flu over the course of a year is pretty
well-understood, while the behavior of the coronavirus over time is not
yet known. And while there are flu vaccines available, there is no vaccine available for the coronavirus (and no proven treatment).
February 26: Trump baselessly predicts the number of US cases is “going very substantially down” to “close to zero”
Trump said:
“I think every aspect of our society should be prepared. I don’t think
it’s going to come to that, especially with the fact that we’re going
down, not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up.” And he said:
“And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days
is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve
done.”
Facts First: Clearly, the number of US cases and deaths was going up, not down. As the New York Times noted
in its own fact check, both Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex
Azar and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Principal Deputy
Director Dr. Anne Schuchat said at the same press conference that they
expected “more cases.”
There were 60
total cases in the US on the day Trump spoke here. The “15 people”
referred to the cases that did not involve people who had been on the
Diamond Princess cruise ship or who had been repatriated from China.
February 26: Trump wrongly says the flu death rate is “much higher” than Dr. Sanjay Gupta said
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN chief medical correspondent, told
Trump, “Mr. President, you talked about the flu and then in comparison
to the coronavirus. The flu has a fatality ratio of about 0.1%.” Trump
said, “Correct.” But Trump later disputed the figure, saying, “And the
flu is higher than that. The flu is much higher than that.” — February
26 coronavirus press conference
Facts First: Gupta was right, Trump was wrong.
Even if Trump meant that the flu has a “much higher” fatality rate than
0.1% — rather than meaning that the flu’s mortality rate is “much
higher” than that of the novel coronavirus — he was wrong, according to
Fauci, other experts and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
February 27: Trump baselessly hints at a “miracle”
Trump said:
“It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will
disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before
it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody
really knows. The fact is, the greatest experts — I’ve spoken to them
all. Nobody really knows.” He made similar comments later in the
outbreak, saying on March 10, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will
go away.”
Facts First: There was no apparent basis for
Trump’s claim that the virus will miraculously “disappear.” (He did
immediately soften the claim by saying “nobody really knows,” but
still.)
February 28: Trump baselessly hints at an immigration link to the virus
Trump said:
“The Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health
and well-being of all Americans. Now you see it with the coronavirus,
you see it. You see it with the coronavirus.”
Facts First: Prominent Democrats do not support
“open borders,” literally unrestricted migration. Aside from that,
though, there was no evidence from the coronavirus situation that
Democrats’ preferred immigration policies would be harmful to Americans’
health. There was no known US case in which someone brought the virus
to the US while immigrating or making an asylum claim.
February 29: Trump exaggerates Tim Cook’s comments about Apple and China
Trump said:
“And if you read, Tim Cook of Apple said that they are now in full
operation again in China.” Trump also said: “You probably saw that — as I
mentioned, Tim just came out and he said Apple is back to normal in
terms of production in their facilities in China. They’ve made a lot of
progress.”
Facts First: Trump was overstating what Cook told
Fox Business. Cook had not said Apple’s production in China was “back
to normal” or that plants in China were in “full operation.” Rather, he
said that plants in China were “getting back to normal.”
“When you look at the parts that are done in China, we have reopened
factories, so the factories were able to work through the conditions to
reopen. They’re reopening. They’re also in ramp, and so I think of this
as sort of the third phase of getting back to normal. And we’re in phase
three of the ramp mode,” Cook said.
March 1: Azar wrongly says 3,600 people have been tested
Azar said: “In terms of testing kits, we’ve already tested over 3,600 people for the virus.”
Facts First: Politico reported:
“Two days later, CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat told the
Senate health committee that her agency had tested more than 3,000
specimens taken from roughly 500 people — a fraction of what Azar
claimed.” Politico reported
that a Health and Human Services spokesperson explained that Azar had
meant to say that the CDC had processed more than 3,600 tests, not that
it had tested more than 3,600 people.
March 2: Trump falsely claims “nobody knew” the number of US flu deaths
Trump said:
“You know, three, four weeks ago, I said, ‘Well, how many people die a
year from the flu?’ And, in this country, I think last year was 36- or
37,000 people. And I’m saying, ‘Wow, nobody knew that information.'” He said at a campaign rally: “So when you lose 27,000 people a year, nobody knew that. I didn’t know that.”
Facts First: Trump might not have known the
number of annual flu deaths in the US, but that doesn’t mean “nobody”
else did. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes annual estimates on its website.
The CDC estimates that between 12,000 and 61,000 people have died in
the US in each flu season between 2010-2011 and 2018-2019; its
preliminary figure for 2018-2019 is 34,157 deaths.
March 2: Trump says a vaccine is coming “relatively soon”
Trump said:
“We had a great meeting today with a lot of the great companies and
they’re going to have vaccines, I think relatively soon. And they’re
going to have something that makes you better and that’s going to
actually take place, we think, even sooner.”
Facts First: “Relatively soon” is too vague a phrase to call this claim false, but Trump did not mention that Fauci had told him earlier that day that a vaccine was “a year to a year and a half” away. Fauci similarly told
the Senate the next day that the process of getting a vaccine ready to
deploy “will take at least a year and a year and a half.”
March 4: Trump falsely claims Obama impeded testing
Trump claimed he had reversed a decision by President Barack Obama’s
administration that had impeded testing for the coronavirus, saying
that “the Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned
out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing. And we undid that
decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much
more accurate and rapid fashion. That was a decision we disagreed with.”
He said
on March 5: “They made some decisions which were not good decisions…We
undid some of the regulations that were made that made it very
difficult, but I’m not blaming anybody.”
Facts First: There is no Obama-era decision or rule that impeded coronavirus testing. The Obama administration did put forward a draft proposal related to lab testing, but it was never implemented.
When asked what Obama administration decision Trump might be
referring to, Peter Kyriacopolous, chief policy officer at the
Association of Public Health Laboratories, said: “We aren’t sure what
rule is being referenced.”
Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, who was principal deputy commissioner of the
FDA under Obama and is now professor of the practice at Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, “There wasn’t a policy that was
put into place that inhibited them. There was no Obama policy they were
reversing.”
March 4: Trump wrongly says as many as 100,000 people died of the flu in 1990
Speaking about deaths from the flu, Trump said
on March 4: “I think we went as high as 100,000 people died in 1990, if
you can believe that.” He said on March 6 that as many as 77,000 people
might die in a given year, then added: “And I guess they said, in 1990, that was in particular very bad; it was higher than that.”
Facts First: While the 1989-1990 flu season was considered bad at the time — the CDC declared that it was an epidemic — Trump greatly overstated the number of deaths. A CDC analysis
in 2010 estimated that there were 26,582 deaths from the seasonal flu
in 1989-1990. (The same analysis found that this number of deaths was
exceeded in nine of the 17 subsequent flu seasons through 2006-2007.)
March 4: Trump says “the borders are automatically shut down”
Trump said
during a meeting with airline chief executives: “And we’re talking
about the effects of the virus on air travel and what they see. In a
certain way, you could say that the borders are automatically shut down,
without having to say ‘shut down.’ I mean, they’re, to a certain
extent, automatically shut down.”
Facts First: Trump did not explain what he meant by “the borders are automatically shut down.” Trump’s travel restrictions on China do not constitute a complete border closure even on China in particular.
Trump’s China policy prohibits entry into the US by non-Americans who
have been in China within 14 days — but it makes exceptions for
immediate family members of American citizens and permanent residents.
And American citizens themselves are free to go back and forth.
Returning citizens who have been in Hubei Province in the previous 14
days are subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine, while
citizens who have been in the rest of mainland China in the previous 14
days “will undergo proactive entry health screening at a select number
of ports of entry and up to 14 days of monitored self-quarantine,”
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said. Still, this is not a shutdown.
March 4: Trump says he believes there was a coronavirus death in New York, though there hadn’t been one
Trump said:
“And then, when you do have a death, like you have had in the state of
Washington, like you had one in California — I believe you had one in
New York…”
Facts First: There had not been any New York
deaths attributed to the coronavirus at the time. (There still had not
been any as of the morning of March 11, seven days later.)
March 4: Trump falsely claims the Obama administration “didn’t do anything” about H1N1
Trump said of H1N1, also known as swine flu: “And they didn’t do anything about it.”
Facts First: The Obama administration did
respond to H1N1. On April 26, 2009, less than two weeks after the first
US cases of H1N1 were confirmed, the Obama administration declared a public health emergency. Two days later, the Obama administration made an initial $1.5 billion funding request to Congress. (Congress ultimately allocated $7.7 billion). In October 2009, Obama declared a national emergency to allow hospitals more flexibility for a possible flood of H1N1 patients.
The Obama administration did face criticism over the pace of the government’s vaccination effort, but “they didn’t do anything” is clearly false.
March 5: Trump misleadingly describes a Gallup poll
Trump tweeted:
“Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are
handling the CoronaVirus situation.” Pointing to the Gallup poll again
at a Fox News town hall the same day, he said the administration got
“tremendous marks” in the poll “for the way we’ve handled it.”
Facts First: The Gallup poll was positive for Trump, as 77% percent of respondents did
say they had confidence in the federal government’s ability to handle a
coronavirus outbreak. But it was not a poll about how the
administration had handled the situation: the poll asked about
confidence in the federal government’s future acts, not about its actual
work to date. Critically, it was conducted from February 3-16, when
there were far fewer reported cases and reported US deaths; Trump was
still, at minimum, 10 days away from appointing Vice President Mike
Pence as his point man on the response.
A Quinnipiac University poll conducted March 5-8 found
that 43% of registered voters approved of the way Trump was handling
the coronavirus response, 49% disapproved. When the poll asked about
confidence in “the federal government” to handle the response, 53% said
they had confidence, 43% said they didn’t.
March 5: Trump wrongly claims the virus only hit the US “three weeks ago”
Trump said,
“We got hit with the virus really three weeks ago, if you think about
it, I guess. That’s when we first started really to see some possible
effects.”
Facts First: The US had its first confirmed case of the coronavirus on January 21, more than six weeks before Trump spoke here.
March 6: Azar wrongly claims there is no test shortage
Azar said: “There is no testing kit shortage, nor has there ever been.”
Facts First: Vice President Mike Pence had said
the day prior: “We don’t have enough tests today to meet what we
anticipate will be the demand going forward.” Doctors, health
authorities and elected officials in various locations around the
country indeed said they did not have enough tests.
March 6: As the number of cases and deaths in Italy rises, Trump says the number is “getting much better”
Trump said: “…I hear the numbers are getting much better in Italy.”
Facts First: The number of confirmed coronavirus
cases and deaths in Italy was continuing to increase at the time Trump
made this comment. As of Saturday, March 7, the day after Trump spoke
here, Italy had 5,883 confirmed cases and 233 deaths; as of Monday, March 9, there were 9,172 cases and 463 deaths. (The Italian government announced a national lockdown on Monday.)
March 6: Trump falsely claims anybody can get tested if they want
Trump said: “Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.”
Facts First: That wasn’t true. There were an
insufficient number of tests available, as Pence said the day prior, and
Americans could not get tested simply because they wanted to get
tested. “You may not get a test unless a doctor or public health
official prescribes a test,” Azar said
the day after Trump’s remark. (Azar claimed Trump was using “shorthand”
for the fact that “we as regulators, or as those shipping the test, are
not restricting who can get tested.”)
March 6: Trump exaggerates the number of people on the Grand Princess cruise ship
Trump said,
of the Grand Princess cruise ship being kept in limbo over coronavirus
concerns, “We do have a situation where we have this massive ship with
5,000 people and we have to make a decision.” He later amended the claim
slightly, “It’s close to 5,000 people.”
Facts First: Trump was overstating the numbers. There were 3,533 people aboard the Grand Princess: 2,422 guests and 1,111 crew members.
March 6: Trump falsely says US coronavirus numbers “are lower than just about anybody”
Trump said that “we have very low numbers compared to major countries
throughout the world. Our numbers “are lower than just about anybody.”
Facts First: Trump was exaggerating. The US did have fewer
confirmed coronavirus cases than some countries, including China,
Italy, Iran, South Korea, France and Germany. But it had more confirmed
cases than big-population countries like India, Indonesia, Pakistan,
Brazil, Russia and Nigeria, plus neighbors Mexico and Canada, plus many
other high-income countries.
In addition, the number of confirmed cases is dependent on how many people are tested. The US was conducting fewer tests than some countries with much smaller populations.
March 6: Trump baselessly muses that “maybe” the coronavirus improved US jobs numbers
Trump touted the jobs report for February, which showed a gain
of 273,000 jobs. He then said that, instead of traveling abroad, “I
think, you know, a lot of people are staying here and they’re going to
be doing their business here.” He continued, “And maybe that’s one of
the reasons the job numbers are so good. We’ve had a lot of travel
inside the USA.”
Facts First: We can’t definitively call this
false, but there’s no evidence to back it up. Reports suggest the
domestic travel industry is also being hurt by the coronavirus.
In March, US airlines announced they were reducing domestic flights as well as international flights in March, and companies called off US conferences and limiting corporate travel. While industry experts said
some particular domestic travel destinations could possibly benefit if
the virus causes travelers to opt for local trips rather than
international trips, there is no hard evidence for that yet.
March 9: Pence says Trump’s “priority” was getting Americans off the ship
Vice President Mike Pence said “the President made the priority to get — to get the Americans ashore.”
Facts First: Trump may have eventually been
convinced to get the Americans ashore, but he had said three days prior
to this Pence claim that he wanted passengers to stay on the ship so
that “the numbers” of US coronavirus cases would stay low.
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