Biden campaign slams Trump for 'outright lying' over COVID-19 threat

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Coronavirus showing no sign of weakening in the US

Christina Coleman reports from Los Angeles.

The Biden campaign on Monday slammed President Trump for "outright lying" to the American people about the threat of the novel coronavirus, after the president claimed over the weekend that the majority of coronavirus cases are “harmless."

Trump said over the weekend that “99%” of coronavirus cases in the United States are “totally harmless,” while White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows echoed the president's claim during an interview on “Fox & Friends” early Monday morning.

"I don't even know that it's a generalization," Meadows said. "When you start to look at the stats and look at all the numbers that we have, the amount of testing that we have, the vast majority of people are safe from this."

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Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates knocked Trump in a statement on Monday -- claiming that the president “has had over six months to stop abysmally failing the American people during this historic public health crisis.”

“But even though over 132,000 Americans have lost their lives and tens of millions have lost their jobs due to his unprecedented negligence and incompetence, he has surrendered to the coronavirus and, for the sake of his own optics, is outright lying to the nation about the extreme threat of COVID-19 while undermining testing,” Bates said.

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Bates went on to criticize the White House, claiming they are “telling Americans that they simply need to ‘live with it.’”

“It's a tragic commentary on the rotten values and dangerousness of this administration that listening to the president and his top staffer could literally compromise even more American lives than their malpractice has already taken,” Bates said. “ And 1 percent of America is 3.2 million people.”

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White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the president’s comments, saying that he was “noting the fact that the vast majority of Americans who contract coronavirus will come out on the other side of this.”

“Of course he takes this very seriously,” McEnany said Monday. “Of course no one wants to see anyone in this country contract COVID, which is why this administration has fought hard to make sure that’s not the case with our historic response effort.”

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McEnany also said that the president's comments were "rooted in science," and referenced two charts from the European CDC, revealing that the "mortality rate in this country is very low."

As of Monday, the United States reported nearly 2.9 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 130,000 deaths.