JOE Biden has been contradicted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after claiming that President Trump was to blame for all of the United States’ coronavirus deaths.
The Democratic nominee was speaking at a town hall event near his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania when he made the comment, branded “outrageous” by senior Republicans.
The remarks came as the total number of people killed by the coronavirus in the US neared 200,000.
Appearing at a drive-in CNN Town Hall on Thursday, Biden said: “If the president had done his job from the beginning, all the people [who have died from coronavirus] would still be alive.
“Look at the data.”
President Trump has faced criticism from opponents for playing down the severity of the virus and calling on state governments to lift their lockdowns.
A number of GOP figures slammed Biden over the comments, and even Speaker Pelosi, the most senior elected Democrat in the US, appeared to contradict the claim.
Speaking at a weekly press conference on Friday, she said that people still serving in the Trump administration would “have to tell their children and their grandchildren the responsibility they have for the fact that we are 200,000 people dead”.
“And that didn’t have to happen. Would they have all been saved? No. But many would have,” she said.
“There’s scientific metrics of how many people could have been saved.”
The comment was also picked up by fact checkers, who pointed out that even countries like New Zealand and South Korea, which are smaller than the US and have won praise for their handling of the pandemic, have suffered some deaths.
Speaking to Fox News following the event, Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, said: “Joe Biden went hyperbolic at a super-sonic level.
“For him to say that every death was the personal fault of the president, that’s pretty outrageous.”
Matt Whitlock, an advisor to the National Republican Senate Campaign, took to twitter to accuse Biden of “letting China off the hook” over its failure to stop the pandemic in its earliest stages.
The Trump campaign also accused CNN host Anderson Cooper of “giving Biden a total pass on his lies and misrepresentations” and said many of the questions put to Biden had been “an invitation for him to attack President Trump.”
Thursday’s event also saw Biden address claims that measures put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus were a violation of civil liberties.
“Wearing [a] mask is about making sure no-one else gets sick. It’s not to protect you so much.
“It’s to make you sure you don’t infect someone else. I call that a patriotic requirement. I call that what we should be doing right now.
President Trump previously resisted wearing a face mask himself, though has begun doing so in recent months, and has vowed not to make coverings mandatory.
The US now has over 6.9million confirmed cases of coronavirus, more than a fifth of the global toll, with around 40,000 positive tests still being recorded each day.
