How Did 2009’s Swine Flu Really Compare With COVID-19? - Slate

When conversation at the the vice presidential debate on Wednesday turned to the coronavirus, Mike Pence pivoted from defense to offense by pillorying Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s response to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, also known as the swine flu.

He depicted the previous administration’s swine flu response as lackluster and used that as proof that a president Biden would not be competent in shepherding the country through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump has long used H1N1 as a cudgel to counter the Biden campaign’s central argument that there’s a dire need for a new and more competent administration to take the reins of the U.S.’s coronavirus response.

Even in March, when COVID-19 was first spreading widely, Trump falsely claimed that Obama “didn’t do anything” about swine flu.

The president began reupping this line of attack after Pence brought up H1N1 in the debate, casting the 2009 pandemic as “one of the great disasters.”!

But the Obama administration’s response to the swine flu wasn’t the calamity that Trump and Pence have made it seem.

During the debate, Pence noted that 60 million Americans contracted H1N1 and said, “If the swine flu had been as lethal as the coronavirus in 2009 when Joe Biden was vice president, we would’ve lost 2 million American lives.” The thing is that the federal government under Obama knew that swine flu was rarely lethal at the time and factored that fact into its decision-making in order to ensure that there wouldn’t be much disruption to the economy.

“Create panic and chaos, sell health care, keep general unrest out there amongst the population—it’s right out the Obama formula,” radio host Rush Limbaugh said in October 2009 in reaction to the then-president declaring a national emergency for the H1N1 pandemic.

Trump has known how lethal the coronavirus is since at least early February.

So while the Obama administration was accused of being too alarmist about a not-very-lethal pandemic, the Trump administration has not been alarmist enough about a fairly lethal pandemic.

One of the most damning statistics for the Trump administration’s coronavirus response, which moderator Susan Page referred to in Wednesday’s debate, is the number of fatalities in the U.S.

That’s a pretty big range, but even if we assumed that the lower end of that estimate is more accurate, then Americans only accounted for about 8 percent of the world’s swine flu deaths.

Did the Obama administration make mistakes with H1N1.

In a 2009 Fox New interview, Trump said of the Obama administration’s measures, “It’s going to be handled.