Did Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden test positive for Coronavirus? No, that's not true: This false reporting is coming from a network of websites in Africa who have published many false news stories.
The story appeared in an article (archived here) published by UCRTV.COM on Friday, March 13, 2020, under the title "USA Presidential Candidate Joe Biden Tests Positive To Coronavirus."
It opened:
Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, tested positive for coronavirus on Friday, two sources have told UCR TV.
This comes a day after the former vice president laid out a new plan to combat the coronavirus that targets Trump as the 2020 election moves into an uncertain phase.
Biden's new campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillo confirmed in an interview with FOX News that his candidate took the test on Thursday evening. He also confirmed Biden had shown signs a day before but felt it was mere flu until the emergency test was taken.
Users on social media saw this:
If this story were true, surely other outlets in the United States would be covering it. On March 14, 2020, The Hill ran a story titled, "Biden has not been tested for coronavirus, campaign says."
They reported:
Former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign said Friday that the presidential candidate has not been tested for the coronavirus and has no symptoms.
"Vice President Biden has no fever, no cough, no shortness of breath or other symptoms consistent with coronavirus, and the campaign has not been informed of or become aware of any relevant contact with an individual who has tested positive," Biden's public health advisory committee said in a statement, according to Bloomberg.
This African website's story is a direct contradiction to the actual news. And, had a Fox News interview been the source of second-hand information, the publishers of the site would have known that Biden's new campaign manager is woman named Jen O'Malley Dillon, not a man named Dillo.
This false story has not gained much traction on Facebook. Several of the links appear to have been removed by the administrators of the groups where the spammer, Frimp Eunuch, had tried to find an audience.
We have seen this profile in the past posting links to false stories into groups for the website MCMNT.COM. Two weeks ago, he was posting false stories about the novel coronavirus in Tanzania and Zambia. We debunked those here.
Another Lead Stories fact-check concerned a death hoax, also published by MCMNT.COM. Our article featured Frimp as one of the amplifying spammers who posts links, and as typical for this network's spamming style, turns off the commenting on the post. Frimp's profile currently gives Kisii, Kenya as his location, but in the past the profile listed Kumasi, Ghana.
