Laura Ingraham argued late Monday that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign is “using the virus panic button,” with the Fox News host saying it is an attempt to “scare old people into voting for someone who seems more like an assisted living resident than future president.”
“The Biden-COVID ticket,” Ingraham said at the beginning of her opening monologue, referring to the virus as the former vice president’s “true running mate.”
“Using the virus panic button is all they have,” she continued. “It’s the only way to scare old people into voting for someone who seems more like an assisted living resident than future president. As if on cue in the final week of the campaign, the media is looking to ‘Vice President COVID’ to do the live heavy lifting for old Joe.”
Her comments come just after the U.S. set a record for new COVID-19 cases when averaged over a seven-day period, according to the COVID Tracking Project. The U.S. has also reported more than 225,000 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began, data compiled by Johns Hopkins University show.
Coronavirus has been the dominant issue in the presidential campaign, and Biden has sought to make Trump’s handling of it his key argument. Trump has argued there would have been even more deaths without his actions, and his allies have also emphasized the work the administration has done to speed the development of a vaccine. But Trump has also been criticized for belittling the wearing of masks. Trump himself tested positive for coronavirus, as did several aides to the vice president this week.
Ingraham, a staunch supporter of the president who reportedly was once under consideration to be White House press secretary, also argued late Monday that President Trump saved “countless jobs and lives” by allowing individual states to make their own decisions on reopening businesses.
“It was the president who dealt with the pandemic and then he decided to push a reopening allowing states to make their own decisions,” she said. “That decision saved countless jobs and lives and thankfully, we now have things like convalescent plasma therapeutics which we know work, and we know steroids can help later in more serious cases.”
“They have taken all the measures in Europe that Biden’s experts are pushing, like extended lockdown,” Ingraham later continued. “Guess what’s happening now in the EU? France mandated masks … [has] widespread contact tracing, and now? Record number of new cases in France.”
France also recorded a record 52,010 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, while Spain declared a new state of emergency as a second COVID-19 wave engulfs parts of Europe.
Biden has largely stayed off the campaign trail amid the pandemic. An NBC analysis released Monday showed that the former vice president has made just 26 campaign visits over the past 67 days. He will campaign in Georgia on Tuesday, while the president travels to Wisconsin, Michigan and Nebraska.
With the U.S. presidential election ending just one week from now, Biden leads Trump in the RealClearPolitics index of polls by an average of 4 points in the key battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona.