Pence Deflects Criticism of Covid Response With a Hypothetical: ‘If the Swine Flu Had Been as Lethal as the Coronavirus…’

Vice President Mike Pence decided to invoke the 2009 H1N1 health crisis in order to defend President Donald Trump’s leadership against the coronavirus pandemic — and he chose to invent a nonexistent, worse-case scenario about the “swine flu” to make his administration’s performance look better.

During a tense exchange at Wednesday night’s debate between Pence and Kamala Harris in Salt Lake City, the vice president scolded the California Democratic senator for “playing politics with peoples’ lives.” Pence attacked Harris for questioning the viability of a coronavirus vaccine backed by President Donald Trump but not by scientists, then he decided to go after former Vice President Joe Biden over the swine flu pandemic.

That was when Pence raised a hypothetical question to try to mitigate the deadly toll of a Covid pandemic that has killed nearly 215,000 Americans so far:

We do know what failure looks like in a pandemic. It was 2009, the swine flu arrived in the United States. Thankfully, it ended up not being as lethal as the coronavirus. But before the end of the year, when Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States, not 7.5 million people contracted the swine flu, 60 million Americans contracted the swine flu. If the swine flu had been as lethal as the coronavirus in 2009, when Joe Biden was vice president, we would have lost 2 million American lives.

A brief reminder: less than 20,000 people died from the swine flu while more than 10 times as many Americans have died from Covid-19 to date.

Watch above, via CNN.