President Biden’s address to the nation was heavy on emotion and hope, but light on facts. Here are two moments where the president stretched the truth.
“That’s more deaths than in World War I, World War II, Vietnam War and 9/11 combined.”
Biden’s math on this is wrong. The president said 527,726 Americans have been recorded as dying from the coronavirus. But, as we have noted before, about 580,000 people died in the three wars he mentioned.
Adding in the nearly 3,000 people who died during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks brings you to just over 583,000.
In the past, the White House said that Biden misspoke and meant to refer to combat deaths. Using just battlefield deaths, you come up with a much different number for the three wars — about 392,000. That’s because more than half the deaths in World War I were not on the battlefield, in part because the 1918 flu pandemic at the time also claimed many lives in the military.
But in this case it’s rather strange for Biden to include 9/11 deaths (not in combat) and then mix that with combat deaths, especially because in-service deaths are more commonly used when referring to the military death toll in wars.
It’s also odd that the White House says Biden is referring to combat deaths — and yet he never seems to utter that caveat. (In his inaugural address, the story was that he was counting all in-service deaths, so it also makes little sense to suddenly change the metrics.)
“I set a goal that many of you said was kind of way over the top. I said I intended to get 100 million shots in people’s arms in my first hundred days in office.”
