To the editor:

Biden has been running ads against Trump on COVID-19. Recent polling (as of Oct. 11) shows that the negative assault has borne fruit as just 35.1% of independents approve of Trump’s response. But what if Biden’s scrutiny were turned around?

As VP, Biden was part of an administration that severely bungled the swine flu (H1N1) response. In fact, Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, said in 2019, “We did every possible thing wrong. Sixty million Americans got H1N1. It is purely a fortuity that [that wasn’t] one of the great mass-casualty events in American history. [It] had nothing to do with us doing anything right, it just had to do with luck.” Indeed. Investigative journalist Kim Strassel (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20) did some math and found that if H1N1 had the lethality of COVID-19 there would’ve been two million deaths. 

So why the spread back then? Some factors could have been that in 2009 the border with Mexico where H1N1 originated was not closed (Trump closed it with China) and that the feds didn’t demand school closures even though it was more lethal for kids than COVID-19 is now. Also only a fraction of promised vaccines were supplied and the national medical stockpile wasn’t replenished, leaving that to Trump.

Given that track record, Biden now advertising that he’ll do better than Trump with the virus is completely without merit. I hope that voters realize this, ignore the ads, and vote for Trump for therapeutics, for a possible vaccine, and for no more lockdowns.