A Wall Street Journal reporter fact-checked several false claims about the federal government’s coronavirus response made by Vice President Mike Pence in an op-ed that ran in the… Wall Street Journal.
In a story published on Friday entitled: “Pence Overstates Coronavirus Supplies Delivered by Administration’s ‘Airbridge’ Program,” WSJ‘s Rebecca Ballhaus examined Pence’s claims and found they were contradicted by public data released by FEMA.
“A Pence official acknowledged the error on Thursday,” Ballhaus noted in her report, adding that the White House’s explanation for the errors involved counting “all supplies delivered by the federal government” and “major medical-surgical distributors that it partnered with.”
Ballhaus’ report was fact-checking a Pence-authored WSJ op-ed,“There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave’” from Tuesday. In it, Pence boasted of the Project Air Bridge’s effectiveness, although all of the numbers he cited were gross overstatements of the actual facts.
As of Friday evening, the Pence op-ed now includes a correction that reads: “An earlier version misattributed the total numbers of personal protective equipment delivered through FEMA to just Project Air Bridge.”