Joe Biden says there are ‘120 million dead from COVID’ in latest gaffe
Joe Biden has once again reminded voters why he richly deserves his self-proclaimed reputation as a “gaffe machine”— adding several extra zeroes to the nation’s coronavirus death toll during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania.
“People don’t have a job, people don’t know where to go, they don’t know what to do,” the former vice president said before his speech in Lancaster Thursday.
“Now we have over 120 million dead from COVID,” Biden continued before correcting himself to say “120,000,” which was not captured by the pool cameraman.
His full quote was: “Now we have over 120 million dead from COVID, I mean, 120,000 dead from COVID. And you have so many—now we’re past 2 million — I mean, and we’re talking about it like it’s over. I mean, it’s over. My God.”
Steve Guest, the Republican National Committee’s national response chief, posted a clip of Biden’s blunder and wrote: “WHAT IS GOING ON WITH JOE BIDEN?”
The president retweeted Guest’s comment and added, “If I ever said something so mortifyingly stupid, the Fake News Media would come down on me with a vengeance. This is beyond a normal mistake. Why isn’t the media reporting it?”
The president’s reelection campaign called Biden “very confused,” adding that “he’s not playing with a full deck, folks.”
“This is after he previously claimed 150 million Americans died from guns,” the Trump War Room said, referring to Biden’s bungling of statistics about how many Americans had been killed by gun violence since 2007 during a February debate with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
They weren’t the only ones reacting on social media.
“Joe’s brain is dying. Please Democrats, don’t do this,” posted Prairie Red, a self-described progressive.
“He’s supposed to stay in his basement so this doesn’t happen,” added poster StarWolf.
But others defended the former veep. “Biden is Biden. He’s going to gaffe. He’s going to trip, maybe even swear someone out if you test him, but one thing is for certain, he’s never changed and you know what you’re getting,” tweeted Girly Girl. In May, Biden made a similar gaffe by claiming that “millions” of Americans had died of the coronavirus and 85,000 jobs had been lost as a result of the pandemic.
“This is not a moment for excuses or deflections or blame game. We’re — we’re in the middle of a pandemic that has cost us more than 85,000 jobs as of today,” he said during a virtual roundtable with three governors.
“Lives of millions of people. Millions of people. Millions of jobs,” he said, possibly realizing his faux pas about the number of jobs after flipping the numbers.
Additional reporting by Bob Fredericks