President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are off to a fast start on the debate stage at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. In the final presidential debate of 2020, they are covering topics from fighting Covid-19 and race in America to climate change and national security.
Thursday’s debate is being moderated by the NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker, who co-anchored a Democratic debate in 2019 with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Andrea Mitchell.
Check back through the night for live updates to the fact checks. For complete coverage and analysis, visit the live blog.
Did Biden get $3.5 million from Russia?
Trump, as part of a lengthy string of unverified allegations about Biden and his family’s financial interests, claimed that Biden received millions “through Russia.”
“Joe got $3.5 million through Russia, and it came through Putin because he was very friendly with the former mayor of Moscow,” the president said.
“You made $3.5 million dollars Joe!” he said.
The president’s claims appear to be rooted in far-right conspiracy theories that the business dealings of the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, were somehow funneling foreign dollars to the vice president and the rest of his family. There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on either Biden’s part, and Biden strenuously denied any foreign revenue streams from the debate stage.
Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security Committee released a report resurfacing allegations that Hunter Biden had foreign business deals that posed “potential conflicts of interests” with Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings considering his father was the sitting vice president.
Largely focusing on those optics, the report doesn’t say that Hunter Biden’s work changed U.S. policy. Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates slammed the report as an “attack founded on a long-disproven hardcore rightwing conspiracy theory” that Johnson “has now explicitly stated he is attempting to exploit to bail out Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.”
One of the main claims about Hunter Biden raised in the GOP report is that he received $3.5 million from a Russian businesswoman.
The GOP report says the Russian wired $3.5 million to a firm associated with Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, told Politico that it was “false” to say the younger Biden received that money because he has no “interest in” the firm.
Read the GOP’s summary of the report here and the Biden campaign’s criticism of the probe here.
Is a vaccine announcement coming ‘within weeks’?
Trump on Thursday again offered an overly optimistic assessment of when a vaccine for Covid-19 will be made available.
“We have a vaccine that’s coming, it’s ready, it’s going to be announced within weeks, and it’s going to be delivered,” Trump said Thursday.
The Food and Drug Administration released guidelines for Covid-19 vaccine makers, stating that the companies would need to track tens of thousands of study participants for at least two months to look for any possible safety issues before the agency would consider authorization.
Given the timeline of when phase 3 clinical trials began, the new guidance indicates that the earliest a Covid-19 vaccine could possibly apply for an emergency use authorization (EUA) would be the end of November.
Last week, Pfizer said it was on track to have that data by the third week of November, and that it would not apply for an EUA before that point. However, the FDA would still need to review the data before granting an EUA.
Kristen Welker, the debate moderator, asked if the president’s statement was a guarantee.
“Yes, no, it’s not a guarantee. It will be distributed by the end of the year,” Trump said.
Is the coronavirus ‘going away?’
“It will go away and as I say, we are rounding the turn, we are rounding the corner, it’s going away,” Trump said, referring to the coronavirus pandemic that’s killed more than 224,000 Americans.
There’s no evidence of this. The U.S. has an uncontrolled outbreak, reporting more than 69,000 new Covid-19 cases today. Cases are climbing in most states, and the U.S. has more cases than any country, with more than 8.3 million, and more deaths than any country, recently surpassing 220,000.
Is Trump ‘immune’ after Covid-19 infection?
Trump has said this before, and it requires more context.
“Now they say I am immune. Whether it’s for a month or lifetime, nobody has been able to say that but I’m immune,” Trump said Thursday.
There is some evidence that coronavirus infection may confer immunity that lasts for a few months after a person has recovered from a Covid-19 infection, though research is ongoing.
Some infections result in lifelong immunity (think chicken pox) while other infections will produce short-term immunity in recovered patients. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said he believes the coronavirus confers at least some short-term immunity.
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Was Biden’s managing of the swine flu epidemic a ‘disaster’?
Trump has frequently called the Obama-Biden administration’s handling of the swine flu a “disaster”
“Frankly, he ran the H1N1, swine flu, and it was a total disaster. It was less lethal, but it was a total disaster. Had that had this kind of numbers, 700,000 people would be dead right now. But it was a far less lethal disease,” Trump said Thursday.
This is not true and requires additional context. Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, has credited luck — and not the Obama administration response — with the fact that the swine flu did not kill more people. (Klain did not head up the response to the H1N1 virus, he was working for Biden at the time. He was, however, the administration’s Ebola czar.)
“We did every possible thing wrong — 60 million Americans got H1N1,” he said at a biosecurity summit in May 2019. “It is purely a fortuity that this isn’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.”
The swine flu is estimated to have killed 12,000 in the U.S., far fewer than the more than 200,000 who have died of Covid-19 to date.
Klain later told Politico his comments referred to the administration’s difficulties producing enough of the vaccine they developed, and argued the Obama team quickly adapted to the pandemic — quickly responding and distributing supplies from the federal stockpile, for example — and made very different choices than the Trump administration.
It’s also worth noting that the Obama administration received generally high marks for its response to the swine flu. While government reports after the fact identified room for growth they also highlighted successes, like rapid research and development of a vaccine that arrived in less than six months. There’s little contemporaneous reporting on the Obama administration response that portrays the kind of unmitigated disaster Trump is suggesting occurred.
Were 2.2 million people projected to die from Covid-19?
Trump, defending his administration’s pandemic response, claimed Thursday that “2.2 million people — modeled out — were expected to die” from the coronavirus.
Trump has made this claim previously — that original projections for coronavirus deaths in America said the country would lose 2.2 million people to the virus.
This is misleading. Trump is referring to a model published on March 17 by Imperial College London, which did predict that 2.2 million people in America could die from the virus, but only if no mitigation efforts whatsoever were in place.
In late March, White House Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx told NBC’s “TODAY” that the projection of 1.6 million to 2.2 million deaths referred to what could happen if America did “nothing” to stop the spread of the virus.
“If we do things together, well, almost perfectly, we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities,” Birx said at the time.
As of Thursday evening, there have been 223,262 deaths attributed to the virus in America, according to NBC News data.