Trump Town Hall Special – COVID

Editorial Team

Politics

17th September 2020

President Trump sat down with a room full of uncommitted voters (Getty Images)

The Claim

“[COVID] would go away without the vaccine, George, but it's going to go away a lot faster with the vaccine”
“People don't want to wear masks. There are a lot of people [who] think the masks are not good.”
“I didn't downplay [COVID]. I, actually, in many ways, I up-played it, in terms of action. My action was very strong.”
“We're very close to having a vaccine. ... We're within weeks of getting it.”
“We have 20% of the [COVID] cases because of the fact that we do much more testing. If we wouldn't do testing you wouldn't have cases. You would have very few cases.”

News posted on

The Recount

Anne Flaherty

Allison Pearson

Emerging story

This past Tuesday, September 17th, marked precisely seven weeks until US 2020 Election Day and precisely two weeks until the first presidential debate. On this occasion, President Trump sat down with a room full of uncommitted voters in the battleground state of Pennsylvania in a 90-minute town hall special anchored by George Stephanopoulos and hosted by ABC News.

The forum gave uncommitted voters the opportunity to ask the president their questions on any and all election issues, and Misbar is taking the opportunity to fact-check the President’s answers in pursuit of viewing equity.

On a side note, ABC News also offered to host a town hall with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, but according to ABC, they and Biden “were not able to find a mutually agreeable date.”

Misbar’s Analysis

Misbar’s investigation into these claims reveals them to be false.

While Trump’s statement that COVID will go away with or without a vaccine is technically correct—after all, once a sufficient proportion of any population becomes immune to a disease, whether by surviving an infection or by becoming vaccinated, that disease is no longer able to spread effectively through that population. This is called Herd Immunity and is why many diseases like smallpox are no longer threats. However, Trump is wrong in the sense that because COVID is a highly mutable disease, being closely related to the common flu, it is likely that in future years there will be more mutations of flu viruses for our bodies to contend with. Hopefully, future viruses will be less problematic than COVID.
While Trump’s statement that many people don’t like to wear face masks is technically true, it also goes against the recommendations of top scientists who say that everyone should wear a mask.
Trump’s statement that he did not downplay the effect of COVID is controversial because he was recently quoted as saying with regard to the virus: “I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic.” However, top expert Dr. Facui has come forward and said that Trump did not downplay the virus, but instead repeated exactly what Fauci had discussed with him privately.
Trump’s statement that we are “very close” to developing a COVID vaccine is obviously subjective. Top experts predict a vaccine will be ready for distribution by the end of 2020. Therefore to say we are “weeks” away is misleading, since it is actually more like three months.
While it is true that the more tests administered for a disease, the greater number of people counted as having the disease, and the US has administered the greatest number of tests of any country, COVID would still exist if it wasn’t being tested for.