Trump overstates what was said in 2019 by Ron Klain, who had been Biden’s chief of staff during the 2009-2010 swine flu pandemic. (He did not run the pandemic response, as Trump often says; he later was in charge of the response to Ebola.) Klain was addressing a question on development of a universal flu vaccine and he warned that relying just on a vaccine would not be enough, as the vaccine developed for that event arrived too slowly. “It’s just purely a fortuity that this isn't one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” he said. “Had nothing to do with us doing anything right. Just had to do with luck.” (Most of the vaccine arrived too late to vaccinate much of the public before the pandemic peaked, a government report later said.) But Klain was not speaking broadly about the swine-flu response by the Obama administration, which was generally praised. He said nothing about Biden’s role. Klain told The Fact Checker he was warning against over reliance on vaccines. “What I was trying to say was that if one relies only on vaccines as your major strategy, and vaccines are late then you are screwed, and really bad things can happen,” he said. “You could argue that what Trump has been doing the past few months — downplaying testing, downplaying masks, downplaying tracing and other public health measures, while promising a cure/vaccine is ‘just around the corner’ — proves my point: the U.S. death rate from Covid post-June is unmatched in the world.”