Newly
nominated Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden blamed President Donald
Trump for not listening to scientists and “walking away” from the coronavirus pandemic,
which has claimed over 1.7 lakh American lives so far

Speaking to
ABC news on Sunday, Biden said, “I don’t blame him for the COVID crisis. I
blame him for walking away and not dealing with the solutions. The idea of
saying that this is going to go away, that some miracle is going to happen,
there’s all talk about the crazy things about bleach and using, I mean it’s
just, he hasn’t listened to the scientists.”

Biden said
he was “prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives.”

“We cannot
get the country moving until we control the virus. That is the fundamental flaw
of this administration’s thinking to begin with. In order to keep the country
running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to
fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus,” he said.

The former
vice president said he would be prepared to shut down the country if scientists
advised him to.

“I would
shut it down, I would listen to the scientists.”

In the first
joint interview of Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris since being formally
nominated at the Democratic National Convention last week, the two set aside
their past differences as rivals and presented a united front to challenge Trump
in the upcoming elections.

Harris affirmed
that the two are “completely aligned on healthcare”, which has been a subject
of debate between the two. Biden has previously opposed Medicare for All, while
Harris supports it.

“Joe Biden
and I are completely aligned on the goal: making sure everyone has health care,
and it’s not a function of how much money they have in their back pocket,” she
said.

“We agree on what we need to do, which is to take it seriously as one of the highest priorities of our government.”

Biden said that their disagreement during the primaries was merely on tactic and that they both agree that “healthcare is a right not a privilege”.  

Harris also
dismissed Trump’s recent criticisms of Harris, where he called the California senator
“mean”, “nasty” and “disrespectful”, as being diversionary.

“I think
that there is so much about what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth that is
designed to distract the American people from what he is doing every day. That
is about neglect, negligence and harm to the American people,” Harris said.

Meanwhile, Biden
labelled Trump as incompetent, saying his comments were out of order.

“No
president– no president has ever said anything like that. No president has
ever used those words, and no president has said people coming out of fields
with torches and spewing anti-Semitic bile and met by people who oppose them,
and someone dies and he says they’re good people on both sides,” Biden said.