Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will “listen to the scientists” if he is elected in November and shut down the U.S. to combat the coronavirus.
The former vice president criticized the “fundamental flaw” of Trump’s administration and its response to the pandemic, telling ABC News anchor David Muir that there can be no economic recovery for the nation until we “fix the virus” and he is prepared to unveil a strategy to do so on day one of his presidency.
Biden spoke for ABC “World News Tonight” on Friday in his first joint interview with vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris since the two accepted the party’s nominations. He asserted that, as president, he will work on the advice of scientists to “save lives” if there is a second wave of COVID-19.
“I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus,” Biden said in the ABC News preview clip of a special edition of “20/20.”
“That is the fundamental flaw of this administration’s thinking to begin with. In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus,” he said.
“So, if the scientists say shut it down?” Muir asked.
“I would shut it down. I would listen to the scientists,” he responded.
The remarks echoed Biden’s grim outlook for America in his DNC acceptance speech this week as he declared that “no miracle is coming” and that, as a “patriotic duty,” Americans will have to come under a “national mandate to wear masks.”
Biden also claimed that “we will never get our economy back on track,” or get schools open and “have our lives back” until “we deal with this virus.”
“And the president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear. He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him. No miracle is coming,” Biden said, slamming President Trump because he allegedly “still does not have a plan.”
“Well, I do. If I’m your president on day one we’ll implement the national strategy I’ve been laying out since March,” he continued, actually claiming he would “put politics aside.”
“We’ll have a national mandate to wear masks not as a burden but as a patriotic duty to protect one another. In short, we’ll do what we should have done from the very beginning,” he said.
Trump called the Democratic National Convention the “darkest, angriest and gloomiest” ever during a speech to the conservative Council for National Policy in Arlington, Virginia.
“They spent four straight days attacking America as racist and a horrible country that must be redeemed,” he said. “Joe Biden grimly declared a season of American darkness, and yet look at what we’ve accomplished until the plague came in.”
“They want to punish America and its citizens instead of holding them high,” President Trump added. “When Joe Biden sees American darkness, I see American greatness.”
