Trump Lies About Obama’s 2009 Response To H1N1

Mediaite reports:



Using his typical insult for Biden, Trump first brought up the H1N1 swine flu epidemic that hit during the early years of the Obama administration, and made two inaccurate or misleading statements. The 78 percent figure Trump cited seems to derive from a Gallup poll from early February 2020 — when public focus on the outbreak was low — that found 77 percent of Americans had “high confidence” in the government’s ability to handle the COVID-19 outbreak.

However, that same polling data also contradicts Trump’s other claim, as Gallup also found that 67 percent of the public had had high confidence in the Obama’s administration’s H1N1 response in 2009, second-highest on record.

In a follow-up Tweet, Trump then slammed the Obama White House for waiting until October 2009 to declare the H1N1 swine flu a “national emergency.” But that too is a partly misleading claim, as the Obama administration had already declared the epidemic a “public health emergency” in April, just weeks after the virus was detected and before anyone had died.