Democratic presidential
candidate Joe Biden on Wednesday launched a scathing attack on President Donald
Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States,
saying that he “has no plan”.

Trump and
Biden faced off in the first presidential debate ahead of the November 3
elections with both clashing on a number of issues from the COVID-19 crisis,
its economic fallout among others.

Also Read: ‘Mr President, will you let him finish…’: US Presidential debate takes off on combative note

“Seven million
people are infected in the United States, we have five percent of the world’s
population, 20 per cent of its deaths. When he presented that number, he said ‘it
is what is it’ because you are who you are. The president has no plan,” Biden said as he tore into Trump.

“He knew it
was a deadly disease, what did he do? He is on tape acknowledging he knew it.
He didn’t want to give a warning because he didn’t want to panic the American
people.”

“This is the
same man that said by Easter this would be gone away. By the warm weather, it
would be gone like a miracle, maybe you can inject bleach into your arm,” Biden
said.

In reply, Trump said Biden failed during his handling of the outbreak of Swine Flu in the
US, while also highlighting the success of his strategy to handle the pandemic.

Also Read: Donald Trump says ‘India, Russia and China don’t give out real COVID-19 death numbers’

“If we
would have listened to you, the country would have been left open, millions
would have died. You never could have done the job that we did, you don’t have
it in your blood. You didn’t do very well with H1N1, you were a disaster,”
Trump said.

Blaming China for the outbreak of the pandemic, Trump also said that one cannot know the true extent of the pandemic in countries like India, China and Russia as they do not “give a straight count”.

“By my
doing it earlier (shutting the country), in fact, Fauci said I saved thousands
of lives. We worked with Democratic governors, go take a look. Most of them said that (I
did a phenomenal job). We got the ventilators and the masks and are now weeks
away from a vaccine.”

Refuting Trump’s
claims on the vaccine, Biden said, “This man is talking about a vaccine. Every
serious company is talking about maybe having a vaccine done by the
end-of-the-year, the distribution of the vaccine will not occur until sometime
beginning in the middle of next year.”

The United States is the world’s worst affected country from the pandemic, with over 7.21 million cases and over 206,000 deaths.