Fact check: Donald Trump made 115 false claims in the last two weeks of February - CNNP... - 0 views
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President Donald Trump made 115 false claims over the last two weeks of February, during which he faced a growing crisis over the coronavirus pandemic, visited India, held four campaign rallies and addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference.Trump made 67 false claims from February 17 through February 23; that was the 11th-highest total of the 34 weeks we've fact checked at CNN. He added 48 false claims from February 24 through March 1; that week ranked 25th out of 34. As usual, many of the false claims were ones he has uttered before.
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The fact that there is notorious video footage showing all this has not stopped Trump from making up an alternative history. He told CPAC on February 29 that he said "Russia, if you're listening" as "a joke," in front "25,000 people," and he was "laughing" afterward along with others in the crowd -- but the media cut off the clip "so quick at the end" so that people couldn't hear all of this laughing.
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VirusesAwareness of Ebola in 2014Comparing the coronavirus outbreak with the Ebola situation of 2014, Trump said, "At that time, nobody had ever even heard of Ebola." -- February 25 press conference in New Delhi, India "Nobody knew anything about it. Nobody had ever heard of anything like this." -- February 26 coronavirus press conference Facts First: Some Americans certainly didn't know a whole lot about Ebola before 2014, but the claims that "nobody" had ever even heard of Ebola and that "nobody" knew anything about it are absurd. Ebola was discovered in 1976. It had been the subject of considerable media coverage in the next three decades, not to mention scientific study.
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Gupta, CNN chief medical correspondent, told Trump at a press conference, "Mr. President, you talked about the flu and then in comparison to the coronavirus. The flu has a fatality ratio of about 0.1%." Trump said, "Correct." But Trump later disputed the figure, saying, "And the flu is higher than that. The flu is much higher than that." -- February 26 coronavirus press conferenceFacts First: Even if Trump meant that the flu has a "much higher" fatality rate than 0.1% -- rather than meaning that the flu's mortality rate is "much higher" than that of the novel coronavirus -- he was wrong. The mortality rate for seasonal flu is "about 0.1%, 0.2% at the most," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health -- who appeared with Trump at this same news conference -- told this to USA Today in mid-February, echoing the comments of other experts and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data since 2010.