Biden's Latest Wildly False Statement: 200 Million People Will Die by the Time I'm Done Talking
By the time you read this, you will already likely be dead.
Wait, why am I writing this? You’ll already be dead. I’ll already likely be dead, too — and if I’m not dead yet, I will be soon. Criminy. I should have invoiced for this in advance. Then again, I’m assuming most of billing would be dead, too, so that approach would have been just problematic. They have more serious staffing concerns.
So, let me start this again: If you’re still alive after I finish this, either we’re in some sort of last-man-on-Earth kind of situation (I guess that means we are legend, huh? I’ll be here all weekend, folks, try the dehydrated apocalypse-proof rations) or Joe Biden’s math was off.
I should have known when he said it on Sunday that something sounded a bit off. The Democratic candidate was in Philadelphia, speaking at the National Constitution Center on the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and diverging into a very serious subject: COVID-19.
It’s one where you need to keep your facts straight. That’s something the man Joe Biden is running to replace, President Donald Trump, has been criticized for, not least of all by Biden himself.
Getting the facts wrong on COVID-19 has, Biden has frequently told us, can cost lives. More lives than we knew, apparently:
Joe Biden: “It’s estimated that 200 million people will die, probably by the time I finish this talk.”
That’s nearly 2/3 of the U.S. population. pic.twitter.com/lp23K11K3o
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) September 20, 2020
“If Donald Trump has his way, the complications from COVID-19, which are well beyond what they should be — it’s estimated that 200 million people have died, probably by the time I finish this talk — the complications of COVID-19, like lung scarring and heart damage, could become the next deniable preexisting condition for over 6 million Americans who’ve already contracted the disease,” Biden said.
This isn’t out of context, by the by:
The problem was that Biden had tacked on an extra set of three zeroes to the actual number he was going for, which was 200,000. At least that’s what I’m assuming, since the number of deaths from the coronavirus in the United States, according to the U.K. Daily Mail, stood at 199,474 as of Sunday, the day Biden was speaking.
Listening to the Democratic standard-bearer’s speech, one could perhaps see how he got tripped up. “Millions” was a common recurring theme throughout the address — the “millions” of Americans Ginsburg inspired, the “millions” of workers President Trump had somehow hoodwinked and ripped off, the “tens of millions” of Americans who would cast their votes early before Oct. 1.
According to a transcript of the speech, “million” or “millions” appeared no less than 18 times, almost once per minute. Apparently, when Biden got to “thousands,” that was just too hard for him to process. I’m guessing that could be it.
That’s not a safe bet with Joe Biden, though. It never is. Consider when he’s messed up with the numbers on the coronavirus before.
Biden told an audience earlier this month that there had been 6,114 “military COVID deaths” and 118,984 “military COVID infections.”
This was only off by, oh, 6,107 military COVID deaths. If Biden has decided to take up reading The Western Journal — something he really ought to do at this point, considering I’m willing to do his math for him, as I’m doing here — that means the total number of military COVID deaths was seven. There had been 40,026 military COVID infections, so he was only off by a little less than 79,000 in that case. (To be fair, CNN and other outlets did the math as well.)
So, yes, one can easily take out “thousands” and put in “millions.” One cannot just as easily take the number “seven” in a speech and mentally glitch by adding 6,107 to it. That requires a certain, well, Biden-ness. (Biden-icity?)
Maybe that wasn’t it, then. Maybe he really thought that 200 million Americans had died already. That means, given that’s nearly two-thirds of the American population, that we’ll all be dead soon.
Or maybe that wasn’t it. Remember, he said that 200 million would be dead “by the time I finish this talk.” Perhaps he was assuming an exponential growth in deaths while he was talking.
Given that meant that 199.8 million Americans would have to die and the speech was a little under 22 minutes. That meant 9.08 million Americans would have had to die per minute before the end of the speech.
I kid, of course. The problem is, I’m kidding about a subject that Biden himself, in the speech he was making, said was a matter of life and death. And yet, he can’t be bothered to pay enough attention to his words to get the number of dead wrong or to correct himself when he makes an error that elevates the number of dead by several orders of magnitude.
He does so even after making the kind of gross error that he did less than two weeks ago with COVID-related military deaths. This is why he’s so frequently chained to a teleprompter these days. And he wants the American people to believe he’ll be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
This, in short, is a gaffe that would be funny if it weren’t so serious.
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