— Ms. HarrisTrue.Ms. Harris is referring to the Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense, a unit under the National Security Council that was established by the Obama administration and focused largely on pandemic preparedness. The team working on the unit was disbanded in May 2018, though a few of its members remained a part of the National Security Council. “It’s impossible to assess the full impact of the 2018 decision to disband the White House office responsible for this work,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post in March. “Biological experts do remain in the White House and in our government.”But Dr. Cameron also noted that she was “mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like Covid-19.”Read more— Mr. PenceThis is exaggerated.Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris support abortion rights, but that does not mean they call for women to have an unfettered right to terminate pregnancies up until the point of birth. Mr. Pence may have been referring to a debate over a bill proposed last year by Democrats in the Virginia legislature that would have made it easier for women to obtain abortions late in pregnancy if the mother’s physical health or safety were at risk.The proposed legislation prompted Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, to falsely claim that Democrats support “abortion up until the moment of birth and even, horrifically, after that.” Other Republicans have echoed the claim.Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris support codifying Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that held states could prohibit abortion after fetal viability — the point at which fetuses can sustain life outside the womb. The current Supreme Court standard holds that states may prohibit abortion after fetal viability so long as there are exceptions for the life and health of the mother.Mr. Biden said during a recent NBC televised town hall meeting in Miami that if Roe were overturned, his “only response to that is pass legislation making Roe the law of the land. That’s what I would do.”Read more— Mr. PenceThis is misleading.Mr. Pence suggested that there remains a question about the chief causes of climate change. But the established scientific consensus is conclusive. The scientific evidence that the combustion of fossil fuels produces emissions that warm the Earth’s atmosphere is ample.Among the most recent, exhaustively researched and authoritative of such scientific reports was the National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive scientific report produced by 13 federal agencies and published in 2017 and 2018. The product of hundreds of experts within the government and academia and peer-reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, it is considered the United States’ most definitive statement on climate change science. It concludes decisively that humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has created the warmest period in the history of civilization.Read more— Mr. PenceThis is mostly true.According to the Covid Tracking Project, more than 111 million coronavirus tests have been performed in the United States since January. But the nation is still falling short of its target of 1.3 million tests per day. Some experts have estimated that 4 million tests per day are necessary to keep the virus in check; others have called for an order of magnitude more. While the absolute number of tests being done is high, so too are cases of the virus, which has infected more than 7.4 million people in the United States. Many tests have also come under scrutiny for delivering inaccurate results, including rapid tests deployed at the White House, where officials relied too heavily on the products to protect top officials from infection, with disastrous results.— Mr. PenceMostly true.It is accurate that the United States’ levels of air pollutants such as smog, soot and asthma-causing nitrogen dioxide have declined steadily over the past 40 years. However, that reduction is largely attributed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on those pollutants, which have tightened over the years. The Trump administration has sought to weaken or freeze those rules.It is also accurate that the United States typically ranks in the top 10 countries for safe drinking water by most measures. However, the Trump administration has also weakened major Clean Water Act regulations.— Ms. HarrisThis is true.In July 2015, President Trump described Senator John McCain of Arizona, a former prisoner of war, to a Republican presidential forum: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”— Mr. PenceThis is misleading.The Islamic State did capture huge swaths of Iraq and Syria, but the Trump administration simply continued the same policy to dismantle the terrorist group that former President Barack Obama implemented in 2014. Mr. Trump did speed up decision-making to allow the military to move more quickly on raids, airstrikes, bombing missions and arming allies in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.But Mr. Trump also shunted blame to the Pentagon for mistakes, including after a botched raid in Yemen in January 2017 that killed a member of the Navy SEALs, despite the president having signed off on the raid himself.“They explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected,” Mr. Trump told Fox News after the raid. “And they lost” the SEAL member, Chief Petty Officer William Owens.Read more— Mr. PenceTrue.The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced and updated the North American Free Trade Pact, passed the Senate in January with a vote of 89 to 10. Ms. Harris was one of 10 senators to vote against the pact. She said she had concluded “that the USMCA’s environmental provisions are insufficient —and by not addressing climate change, the USMCA fails to meet the crises of this moment.”Read more— Mr. PenceThis is misleading.Mr. Biden has offered shifting accounts of how he counseled then President Barack Obama. It is clear that he was more skeptical than most other Obama administration officials about the May 2011 operation that killed bin Laden. But saying that he opposed the raid outright, as Mr. Pence also did at the Republican National Convention, is at best a selective interpretation of the available evidence.In the months after Mr. Obama ordered the risky mission, Mr. Biden said he had been skeptical of the unconfirmed intelligence showing that bin Laden was hiding in a compound in Pakistan. In January 2012, he recalled having told Mr. Obama in a final Situation Room meeting when top officials were polled on their positions: “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go.” But he implied that his view was subject to change, saying that more work should be done “to see if he’s there.”A few months later, he added more detail to his account, saying that he spoke privately with Mr. Obama after that Situation Room meeting and told him, “Follow your instincts, Mr. President.” At the time, Mr. Biden recounted, “I knew he was going to go,” thus indicating that he was implicitly endorsing Mr. Obama’s decision to act. In 2015, Mr. Biden offered a new account of his private exchange with Mr. Obama after the meeting. “I told him my opinion, that I thought he should go, but follow his own instincts,” Mr. Biden said. “Imagine if I had said in front of everyone, ‘Don’t go,’ or ‘Go,’ and his decision was a different decision. It undercuts that relationship.” That analysis conflicts with his first account of telling Mr. Obama to delay the operation.Subsequent books by former Obama officials describe Mr. Biden as skeptical of the intelligence and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates recounted that “Biden’s primary concern was the political consequences of failure.” Mr. Biden’s own 2017 memoir does not mention the bin Laden raid, and Mr. Obama has not commented on the matter.Read more— Ms. HarrisThis is exaggerated.Economic estimates of job losses resulting from the president’s trade war with China vary but a September 2019 report by Moody’s Analytics estimated the trade fight had already cut overall American employment by 300,000 jobs and reduced economic output by 0.3 percentage points. Farmer bankruptcies have risen during the trade war, which prompted China to impose retaliatory tariffs on American soybeans, pork and other agricultural products. But the U.S. is not in a manufacturing recession, which is commonly defined as output shrinking for two consecutive quarters. Factory output was sluggish through 2019 in part as a result of the trade war and plummeted with the pandemic but has been recovering since April.Read more— Mr. PenceFalse.While it is true that the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions have declined by more than 10 percent in the past decade, more than a dozen other countries — including most of the European Union — have seen declines of more than twice that. Carbon emissions in the United States have declined in part recently because of the recession and collapse of a coal industry that the Trump administration tried to protect.But U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are on track to begin increasing in the coming years, in part because of the Trump administration’s rollbacks of regulations on carbon dioxide pollution.— Mr. PenceThis is exaggerated. This was a reference to a series of questions Ms. Harris asked Judge Brian Buescher in 2018 during hearings on his nomination to a federal District Court seat about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, an organization of Catholic men.She did not say explicitly that his membership in the organization was disqualifying, but did ask whether Judge Beuscher was aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed same-sex marriage and abortion, and whether he held those views. Some religious groups and Republican senators accused Ms. Harris of exhibiting anti-Catholic bias with the questions. — Ms. HarrisThis is false.Mr. Biden’s stated campaign plan proposes to repeal some, but not all, of the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017. The House and Senate would have to pass new tax legislation to accomplish that.— Mr. PenceThis is exaggerated.Mr. Pence sought to blame the Obama administration for the challenges in responding to this year’s coronavirus pandemic, citing an “empty” Strategic National Stockpile. The stockpile was far from empty.It is true that the stockpile, which includes supplies for responding to a range of national health disasters, was short of enough equipment such as masks to meet surging demand during the opening months of the pandemic. Greg Burel, who was the director of the stockpile until this year, told CBS News this year that the stockpile had not received funds to replace masks and other equipment that were used in response to the 2009 swine flu pandemic.But Mr. Burel had said last year that the stockpile was an “$8 billion enterprise” that had undergone “a dramatic expansion of the scope” of its capabilities. A Washington Post reporter who visited one of the stockpile sites in 2018 described a massive warehouse with “hundreds of thousands of shrink-wrapped boxes of medicines” stacked nearly five stories high.And while Mr. Pence points to the actions of the prior White House administration, his administration had three years to make investments to build out the stockpile. That didn’t happen.Read more — Mr. PenceTrue. Mr. Pence made a very precise and therefore accurate claim. But it’s worth noting that these metrics do not fully capture the complex beliefs of a lawmaker.Newsweek was referring to analysis from GovTrack, a service that monitors Congress. The website ranked Ms. Harris as the most liberal senator of 2019, based on each lawmaker’s patterns of serving as a co-sponsor of legislation. But it rated Mr. Sanders as more liberal than Ms. Harris in 2017, 2018 and 2020 so far. Joshua Tauber, GovTrack’s founder, also told The Times that “we’d be the first to disavow our analysis as proof that Senator Harris is radical.” He noted that the rankings reflect just one aspect of a lawmaker’s job and do not capture the complex views an individual could hold so “our analysis does not reflect the totality of Harris’s political views.” DW-Nominate, an ideological position tracker based on votes, rated Ms. Harris as more liberal than Mr. Sanders but less liberal than Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts in the 2017 to 2019 legislative session.Scoring by ideological groups also support Mr. Pence’s assertion. Mr. Sanders earned a higher lifetime score from the American Conservative Union than Ms. Harris, based on how their votes and positions align with conservative positions. Conversely, Ms. Harris received a higher score from Progressive Punch than Mr. Sanders. Read more— Mr. PenceFalse. President Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean P. Conley, has repeatedly declined to answer several important questions about his illness, including when Mr. Trump had his last negative test for the coronavirus and his first positive one. Dr. Conley also initially refused to say whether the president had received supplemental oxygen. It was only on Sunday, two nights after Mr. Trump arrived at the hospital, that Dr. Conley acknowledged Mr. Trump had a high fever and that his oxygen level dropped on Friday morning, before he was taken by helicopter to Walter Reed. Dr. Conley has also not revealed anything about the condition of Mr. Trump’s lungs, though the president’s oxygen levels had dropped to a level that can indicate that a patient’s lungs are compromised.Read more— Mr. PenceMostly true.According to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, the typical family of four received a $2,000 tax cut in 2018, the first year that Mr. Trump’s tax cut was in effect. However, the statement is misleading because it suggests that the tax cuts were spread equitably across the country. The bulk of the tax cuts benefited the highest earners. Moreover, many of the individual tax cuts will expire in 2025 unless they are extended.— Mr. PenceThis is misleading.It is true that the economy has added back a lot of jobs since the depths of the pandemic, regaining about 11.4 million of the 22 million jobs it lost between February and April. But that rebound had relatively little to do with Mr. Trump’s policies. People came back to work quickly because they had been temporarily furloughed as states and cities shut down amid the virus, and businesses brought workers back to their jobs as they reopened. The government’s Paycheck Protection Program — which offered forgivable loans to small businesses that retained employees — helped, and payments to households supported consumer spending and may have prevented deeper recession dynamics from taking hold.Read more— Mr. PenceThis lacks evidence.In 2009, the H1N1 flu virus infected about 60 million Americans and killed an estimated 12,500 people. Mr. Pence suggests that 2 million would have died if this strain of flu were as deadly as the coronavirus — 160 times the actual death toll. There’s not enough data to support the vice president’s statement, and it’s unclear how he arrived at these figures. Mr. Pence may be extrapolating from current estimates of the global burden of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 36 million people around the world and killed more than 1 million. Roughly doubled, these statistics could arrive at about 2 million deaths among 60 million infections.But experts have repeatedly stressed that it is extremely difficult to calculate the death rate linked to a new pathogen like the coronavirus during an ongoing outbreak — especially one as vast, fast-moving and geographically far-reaching as the Covid-19 pandemic. Researchers are still unsure what proportion of coronavirus infections are without symptoms; without adequate testing, these individuals are difficult to pinpoint and factor into case counts. And it is also difficult to tabulate deaths.What has been so far, however, is that the coronavirus is more deadly and more contagious than typical seasonal flu viruses, which tend to kill around 0.1 percent of the people they infect.Read more— Mr. PenceThis is false.Mr. Biden has described the tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed on more than $360 billion of Chinese products in the course of the trade war as erratic and self-defeating, and has called for more targeted measures against China, but he has not publicly committed to repealing all of the tariffs. Mr. Biden actually appears reluctant to commit either way to fully keeping or eliminating the tariffs, and his aides have said that he plans to evaluate the tariffs once in office based on their impact on the American middle class.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/07/us/fact-check-harris-pence-debate