President Trump tore into his presumptive Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden on Friday, saying the “incompetence” of former President Barack Obama and his then-vice president caused 17,000 people to die from swine flu.
“Biden/Obama were a disaster in handling the H1N1 Swine Flu. Polling at the time showed disastrous approval numbers,” Trump tweeted.
Trump added: “17,000 people died unnecessarily and through incompetence! Also, don’t forget their 5 Billion Dollar Obamacare website that should have cost close to nothing!”
Trump has bristled at criticism from Biden during the COVID-19 outbreak, though the two men spoke this month on the phone about the crisis.
Biden has faulted Trump for allegedly ignoring warnings about the coronavirus before US cases surged and said he implored Trump not to trust China’s early reporting.
The swine flu, or H1N1, outbreak of 2009 swept widely through the US, infecting up to 84 million Americans, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC estimated between 8,330 and 17,160 deaths from H1N1 from April 2009 to Jan. 16, 2010.
Trump and Biden spoke for about 15 minutes on April 6. The men agreed not to divulge the content of the discussion, but Trump told reporters, “We had a really wonderful, warm conversation.”
The US has the world’s largest publicly acknowledged outbreak of COVID-19, with more than 670,000 cases and nearly 34,000 deaths.
About 17 million Americans, roughly 10 percent of all workers, lost their jobs in a three-week period due to business closures aimed at slowing the spread of the contagion, according to unemployment insurance data released Thursday.