On his nationally-syndicated radio show on Thursday, conservative host Mark Levin contrasted the coronavirus pandemic with the Obama-Biden administration’s response to the 2009 swine flu epidemic, especially its decision to stop testing.
Levin replayed a C-SPAN clip from May 2019 in which Ron Klain, a former chief of staff for Biden, says that the Obama-Biden response team “did every possible thing wrong.”
We had a bunch of really talented, really good people working on it and we did every possible thing wrong and 60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time.”
“Well, why didn’t they prevent it?” Levin asked. “Why didn’t they have everybody hunker down?”
A report by CBS in 2009 said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told states to stop testing. Levin quoted the CBS reporter Sharyl Attkinson, “In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for the H1N1 flu and stop counting individual cases.”
“The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was ‘why waste resources testing for the swine flu when the government has already confirmed that there is an epidemic?’”
“But Obama, Biden said no more testing, therefore no more reporting on the consequences. This is so damning. This is so damning.”
An estimated 12,469 individuals in the United States died from (H1N1) pandemic virus infection in the first year of the outbreak, according to the CDC. COVID-related deaths in the United States number 126,647 between early February and July 17.