Wall Street Journal fact checks false claims Mike Pence made in op-ed published in the paper days before
This Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal where he claimed that alarm bells about a "second wave" of coronavirus are "overblown" that the Trump administration is "winning the fight" against the ongoing health crisis. But this Friday, the Journal ran a fact check on the very op-ed that itself published, saying that Pence "overstated the amount of coronavirus-related medical equipment distributed by a Trump administration program on multiple occasions, according to public data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency."
In his article, Pence praised Project Airbridge, a public-private partnership championed by Jared Kushner, writing that Project Airbridge delivered more than 143 million N95 masks, 598 million surgical and procedural masks, 20 million eye and face shields, 265 million gowns and coveralls and 14 billion gloves for the fight against coronavirus.
But according to WSJ, that's not accurate.
"According to FEMA data, through June 18 the program had delivered 1.5 million N95 masks, 113.4 million surgical masks, 2.5 million face shields, 50.9 million gowns, 1.4 million coveralls and 937 million gloves," WSJ's Rebecca Ballhaus writes. "The total number of those supplies is about 7%—or one-thirteenth—of the numbers cited in Mr. Pence’s article."
Read the full fact check over at The Wall Street Journal.
Data visualization by Politico[/caption]