Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the man who forced nursing homes to take in COVID-19 positive patients, threw a hissy fit because Pfizer’s vaccine will come out during President Donald Trump’s administration.
What a petty and obnoxious little man.
Grabien has the transcript (emphasis mine):
STEPHANOPOULOS: “Let’s talk about that now with New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo. Governor Cuomo, thanks for coming back again this morning. We were talking yesterday about the importance of vaccine distribution in the next two months. What do you make of this news?”CUOMO: “Well, it’s good news/bad news. The good news is the Pfizer tests look good and we’ll have a vaccine shortly. The bad news is that it’s about two months before Joe Biden takes over and that means this administration is going to be implementing a vaccine plan. The vaccine plan is very important and it’s probably the most ambitious undertaking since Covid began. Just to put it in focus, we did 10 million Covid tests in this nation over seven months scrambling doing everything we can. We now have to do 330 million vaccinations, maybe twice, my state does more testing than any state in the United States. We did 12 million tests. We have to do 20 million vaccines. And the Trump Administration is rolling out the vaccination plan and I believe it’s flawed. I believe it learns nothing from the past. They’re basically going to have the private providers do it and that’s going to leave out all sorts of communities that were left out the first time when Covid ravaged them.”STEPHANOPOULOS: “So what needs to be done that the Trump Administration won’t do that President-Elect Biden could do?”CUOMO: “Yeah, the Biden administration, when you deny — when you deny a problem the way Trump did, you can never solve it and that’s true in life. The Trump Administration denied Covid. So they were never ready for it. There was no mobilization of the government. And they’re still doing the same thing. They’re going to take this vaccine and they’re going to go through the private mechanism. Through hospitals, through drug market chains, et cetera. That’s going to be slow and that’s going to bypass the communities that we call health care deserts. If you don’t have a rite aid or a CVS then you’re in trouble and that’s what happened the first time with Covid. Why do we have such a disparity in the infection rate and mortality rate in Covid? Because some communities don’t have the same access to health care. I’m sure the Biden administration is going to address that. I think his first step saying let’s focus on the science, let’s depoliticize testing data, listen to the scientists is the exact opposite of Trump but you have two months and we can’t let this vaccination plan go forward the way that Trump and his administration is designing it because Biden can’t undo it two months later. We’ll be in the midst of it and I’m going — I’ve been talking to governors across the nation about that. How can we shape the Trump Administration vaccine plan to fix it or stop it before it does damage.”
Cuomo is saying that the government can do better than the private sector in terms of distribution, but there’s no evidence of that or that lack of access to pharmacies had any impact on health distribution of testing. And why should we trust government to do it better, considering how Cuomo’s government screwed things up.
I cannot imagine what Cuomo would have said if Pfizer made the announcement before the election.
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