Where the hell is Luhan? Biden makes another Wuhan gaffe while slamming Trump over CDC withdrawal from China
By now, Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden’s goof-ups are world-renowned. The former vice president has fallen short of perfection on a number of occasions this election cycle and the latest instance occurred on Monday, March 30, while he was being interviewed on MSNBC. Biden has had a remarkable March as he dominated all three Super Tuesdays to get close to the required delegate count to clinch the nomination over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. But off the election ring, Biden has made headlines for wrong reasons.
During the interview, Biden, who has been trying to connect his campaign to tackle the pandemic through a virtual campaign, referred to the epicenter of the virus by a wrong name. The entire episode reportedly started off in the Chinese city of Wuhan and engulfed the entire world in a span of a few months.
The former senator from Delaware, though, got the name of Wuhan wrong. He told the channel: “I suggested we should have people in China at the outset of this event, when it all started, in Luhan Province.” He also claimed that the Trump administration withdrew staffers from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in the months prior to the outbreak of the virus, as it has been exclusively reported by Reuters last week.
“We had people in our administration, we had CDC people in other countries because we wanted to anticipate when in fact another virus would occur, when in fact a pandemic might occur as a consequence of a spreading virus in another country, to act quickly. The president withdrew those people,” Biden said.
This is not the first time he referred to Wuhan as Luhan. Joe Biden's earlier slip-up on March 27 made 'Luhan virus' trend online and K-pop fans freaked out thinking he was referring to the former Exo boy band member Lu Han.
Biden has been making a lot of goof-ups of late
The focus yet remained glued to the list of gaffes that Biden has been making of late on air. In one of his virtual campaigning, an issue with the teleprompter showed the veteran saying he has spoken a lot on coronavirus and it was time for shifting to a second topic. He said at another instance that he is not interested to take part in another presidential debate with Sanders as he is focusing more on fighting the pandemic, which has affected over 188,000 people in the country besides killing more than 4,000.
Last week, Biden confused the dates of an op-ed he penned for USA Today saying it was on January 17 while the actual date was January 27. He also mixed up the names of drugstores and government agencies, calling CVS as CVC.
Even when thanked by the MSNBC host for the interview, Biden embarrassed his supporters by saying: “Well, thanks for giving me the time. So they won’t wonder where I am.” Biden’s campaign has been pegged back by the pandemic and he is now confined to the home studio of his home in Delaware, prompting people to question his whereabouts despite being a prime presidential candidate.
Biden has got 1,217 delegates at the moment as against Sanders’ 914 and he needs another 700-plus to get nominated as the Democratic candidate.