Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in interviews on Sunday both condemned President Trump’s and his administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.
The two 2020 Democratic presidential candidates criticized the president’s response as the threat from the virus expands in the U.S., with the first recorded death from the disease confirmed in Washington state on Saturday.
Biden said on ABC’s “This Week” that his response as president would have been “fundamentally different,” denouncing the administration for previously cutting funding to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and appointing Vice President Mike Pence to lead the fight against the disease, among other concerns.
“This has been outrageous the way they proceeded,” he said. “They should let the scientists speak.”
The former vice president also slammed Trump for comments during a rally in South Carolina where the president called the Democrats’ criticism of the coronavirus response “a hoax” and compared it to the impeachment.
“This is not a Democratic hoax,” Biden said. “This is incompetence on the part of the president of the United States at the expense of the country and the world.”
Sanders on the same show also knocked the administration’s reaction to the outbreak, saying that as governments globally are trying to combat the virus, Trump took to South Carolina to “undermine” the Democratic primary, which “blows me away.”
“How pathetic is it that in the midst of an international health care crisis, you’ve got a president running into South Carolina trying to steal some media attention away from Democrats,” the senator said.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar also appeared on “This Week” Sunday and cautioned against the “partisan sniping that we’re seeing.”
“We don’t need to have this made a political issue,” he said. “We’re in a public health crisis here. We need to all be banding together.”
The coronavirus has infected 72 people in the U.S., among more than 87,000 worldwide. Almost 3,000 have been killed from the virus, with one in the U.S. thus far, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.