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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Joe Sommerlad

Biden news: Campaign aide says Trump should have ‘gone to school’ on Covid ‘200,000 lives ago’

Photograph: Getty Images
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Sunday

Joe Biden offered his prayers for the recovery of Donald and Melania Trump as he agreed to face the president at the second debate on 15 October.

Speaking at a campaign event in Florida on Monday, Biden told reporters he didn't want to comment on the president's behaviour while suffering from coronavirus. Later at his his campaign rally, Biden said Trump needed to listen to the scientists and call for a nationwide mask rule.  

On the stump at his Bernie for Biden event in Michigan, Bernie Sanders said Biden would be the most progressive president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Kamala Harris side of the Democratic ticket, meanwhile, is moving forward with the vice presidential debate against Mike Pence as long as there is a plexiglass divider between the two contenders.

Elsewhere, Biden adviser Antony Blinken, hit out at Trump over the president’s belated claim that he has “learned a lot about Covid” since his diagnosis and admission to hospital on Friday.

Blinken, the Democratic presidential nominee’s adviser on foreign policy, said on that Trump’s acknowledgement that he had "gone to school” on coronavirus by catching it, having spent months downplaying its seriousness, was not only ”devastating" but should have occurred “200k deaths ago, not when it affected you" - the figure an allusion to the number of US casualties so far.

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