Trump Misleads on H1N1 Swine Flu Testing
Deflecting attention from the rise in COVID-19 cases, President Donald Trump has repeatedly said the Obama administration “stopped testing” during the H1N1 pandemic. He’s correct that individual reporting was halted after a few months, but some testing did continue — and the two viruses are very different, making the comparison misleading.
Whereas pandemic H1N1 influenza was no worse than the seasonal flu, and testing did not play much of a role in controlling the spread of the virus, COVID-19 is far more deadly, and testing is critical for contact tracing and isolation.
Trump first mentioned the Obama administration’s decision to halt reporting of individual H1N1 influenza cases at a July 13 roundtable on law enforcement, when the president was asked by a reporter whether he would acknowledge that coronavirus cases were rising because of increased spread of the virus, and not just because of testing, as Trump has frequently claimed.
In response, Trump falsely said that the U.S. has one of the lowest COVID-19 mortality rates — it does not — and then proceeded to say that President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden “stopped testing” during the 2009 pandemic.
