A tweet sent by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden warning about a pandemic was trending on Twitter today, the one-year anniversary of the post.
“We are not prepared for a pandemic,” Biden tweeted on Oct. 25, 2019, saying the country needs leadership that “mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores.”
We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores. https://t.co/1qqpgayUEX
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 25, 2019
At the time Biden was sharing an article by the Washington Post that said none of the 195 countries, including the U.S., is fully prepared for a pandemic, based on a report by D.C.-based nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
The tweet, now gathering over 131,000 likes, has gone viral several times before as the coronavirus raged in the U.S.
Biden himself bragged about his prescient warning in May, pairing the tweet and President Trump’s same-day tweet complaining to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook about the design of the iPhone.
Biden has made criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic a central theme of his campaign, while Trump has cast doubts on whether Democrats could have done better.
Trump has at times brought up the Obama administration’s handling of the H1N1 swine flu in 2009, which caused an estimated 12,469 deaths in the U.S.
Today, Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said in an interview on CNN that the U.S. is “not going to control the pandemic” and will instead focus on getting vaccines and therapeutics.
Campaigning for Biden in Florida on Saturday, former President Barack Obama took another swing at the current administration.
“We literally left this White House a pandemic playbook that showed them how to respond before a virus reached our shores,” Obama said. “It must be lost along with the Republican health care plan. We can’t find it.”