Brain Freeze: Joe Biden Says Coronavirus Started in ‘Luhan Province’

Joshua Caplan

Appearing Monday on MSNBC, former Vice President Joe Biden erroneously referred to Wuhan — the Chinese city (of the Hubei province) in which the deadly coronavirus originated — as “Luhan province.”

A partial transcript is as follows:

YASMIN VOSSOUGHIAN: As you’ve been seeing, our healthcare system seems to be crumbling underneath this crisis. There’s not enough, there’s not enough support for the healthcare systems, there’s not enough support for the American people inside the healthcare system. Are you now reconsidering your position when it comes to single-payer healthcare?

JOE BIDEN: Single-payer will not solve that at all. The thing that is needed, for example, we have a whole number of hospitals that are being so stretched, including rural hospitals that are going to need more financing. That doesn’t come from a single-payer system, that comes from the federal government stepping up and dealing with the concerns that they have, the reimbursement that they are going to get, how they are going to be able to move forward and how her going to be able to provide all the needed help needed in their communities.

This is an opportunity to look at reconstructing the healthcare system in a way that in fact can respond more rapidly and more effectively to these kinds of crises because it is going to come again. We should be spending — and we are —  spending a great deal of time and effort finding a vaccine, finding a way that we can deal with preventing these diseases further down the road. But for example, we had people when our administration, we had CDC people in other countries because we wanted to anticipate when in fact another virus would occur, when in fact a pandemic might occur as a consequence of a spreading virus in another country, to act quickly. The president withdrew those people. I insisted — I didn’t insist — I suggested that we should have people in China at the outset of this event when it all started in Luhan province. And what happened? We did not insist they go into the areas. That’s all I can do — do what I know has to be done, so what I know has to be done.

This verbal flub comes after Biden, the 2020 Democrat frontrunner, called the illness the “Luhan Virus” during a virtual town hall on Friday.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.