Former Vice President Joe Biden made a verbal gaffe during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania Thursday and said over 120 million people had died from the novel coronavirus, before correcting himself, The Daily Caller reports.
Biden made the gaffe during a town hall on the Affordable Care Act in Lancaster, Pennsylvania when he was talking about mental health services.
“What people drastically underestimate is the impact on the mental health of people who now, everything is complicated,” Biden told the audience. “Not only is the health care piece, people don’t have a job, people don’t have anywhere to go, they don’t know what they’re gonna do.”
“A lot of people, you have unnecessarily, now we have over 120 million dead from COVID,” Biden added.
However, the actual death toll from the illness in the US stood at about 122,000, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
The live stream of Biden’s event appeared to cut out as the former vice president was preparing to correct himself.
President Trump’s re-election campaign called Biden “very confused,” adding that “he’s not playing with a full deck, folks.”
“This is after he previously claimed 150 million Americans died from guns,” the Trump War Room said, referring to Biden’s bungling of statistics about how many Americans had been killed by gun violence since 2007 during a debate with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in February.