No, Trump Did Not ‘Threaten’ to Withhold Coronavirus Vaccine From New York

No, Trump Did Not ‘Threaten’ to Withhold Coronavirus Vaccine From New York

As they often do, the Democrat/media outrage mobs kicked it into high gear late Friday after President Trump delivered the latest updates on Operation Warp Speed from the Rose Garden.

After noting his administration would be working “to secure an emergency use authorization, which should be coming down extremely soon,” Trump then said the administration “will then coordinate the distribution of the [Wuhan Coronavirus] vaccine, and it will be approved, I think … very quickly, we hope.”

Trump later said that once the vaccine received “final approval” that it would be going to “the entire general population, with the exception of places like New York state,” the latter of which Trump pointed out would not get it right away because “the Governor decided … he wants to take his time with the vaccine. He doesn’t trust where the vaccine is coming from.”

The President went on to explain that “[Cuomo] doesn’t trust the fact that it’s this White House, this administration. So we won’t be delivering it to New York until we have [his] authorization to do so, and that pains me to say that.”

Trump talked about a minute and a half about Cuomo and the reason for the delay, which we’ll get into more in a minute.

But first, let’s take a look at some of the outrageous headlines that either falsely labeled what Trump said as a “threat” to Cuomo and New York or which bizarrely claimed the vaccine “won’t be delivered” to the state:

NY Daily News- Trump threatens to deprive New York of ’amazing’ COVID-19 vaccine as infection levels spike
CNBC – Trump says coronavirus vaccine won’t be delivered to New York
CNN – Gov. Cuomo responds to Trump’s threat to not send vaccine to New York: ‘He tries to bully people’
Politico – Cuomo says Trump is ‘incompetent’ and ‘irrelevant’ after vaccine threat

The big problem with characterizing Trump’s remarks as a “threat” to withhold the vaccine from New York is that it’s simply not true, which the video of his full remarks on Cuomo and New York specifically shows.

Watch below and/or check out the transcript for Trump’s full comments:

Once again, the media LIE by reporting that @realDonaldTrump is punitively withholding COVID vax from NY. "So we won't be delivering it to New York until we have authorization to do so…the governor will let us know when he's ready." pic.twitter.com/G5xbFCi2in

— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) November 13, 2020

Naturally, New York state’s far-left anti-Trump Attorney General Letitia James jumped at the chance to virtue signal about how she would file a lawsuit if Trump denied access to a “lifesaving vaccine”:

Any attempt by Donald Trump to deny New York access to a lifesaving #COVID19 vaccine will be met with a lawsuit, plain and simple.

Stop playing politics with people's lives.

— NY AG James (@NewYorkStateAG) November 13, 2020

If the mainstream media weren’t so far up Cuomo’s you-know-where, what they really should have been outraged about this week was what Cuomo said about the vaccine Monday, which is what led Trump respond the way he did Friday in the Rose Garden (bolded emphasis added):

Cuomo blasted President Trump’s vaccine plan Monday morning as “flawed” and went so far as to declare: “We can’t let this vaccination plan go forward the way that Trump and his administration is designing it.”

[…]

“You have two months, and you can’t let this vaccination go forward the way the Trump administration is designing it — because Biden can’t undo it two months later,” he said.

“We’ll be in the midst of it. And 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.”

Watch:

!@NYGovCuomo says it’s “bad news” Pfizer’s Covid vaccine came during the Trump Admin; says he’s going to work w/ other governors to “stop” distribution “before it does damage" pic.twitter.com/ULembNWokW

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 9, 2020

So who’s the real vaccine villain here? Cuomo, who did the actual threatening this week by admitting he had been plotting behind the scenes with other governors on how to “stop” Trump’s “flawed” vaccine plan before it got started, or Trump, who correctly pointed out Cuomo didn’t trust him enough to accept the vaccine and as a result would direct his administration to await Cuomo’s approval before sending the vaccine to New York?

Cuomo had the gall to tell CNN Friday in response that Trump was trying to “bully” the people of New York. And, with the grating arrogance we’ve grown accustomed to seeing often from the Cuomo brothers, the elder Cuomo donned his Superman cape and declared that he was “not going to let a bully push New Yorkers around, period” (because only Cuomo is allowed to do that, of course). He told MSNBC in another interview that Trump had been “incompetent” in his handling of the pandemic.

The governor’s accusations would be laughable if the issue wasn’t so deadly serious. The truth of the matter is that Cuomo’s disastrous handling (which he blames on Trump) of the Wuhan virus crisis in his state has been well-documented by even the liberal New York Times and the left-leaning investigative journalists at ProPublica. His nursing home mandates killed thousands of senior citizens in his state, which to this day Cuomo blames on everyone but himself.

Cuomo can crow until the cows come home about how “incompetent” Trump’s handling of this pandemic allegedly has been, but it was Cuomo’s one-upmanship political games with NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio early on at the start of the outbreak that set the stage for the heartbreakingly brutal toll the virus would take on his state. It was Cuomo’s failure to get a handle on the virus early on that caused his state to become the “primary gateway” for the spread of the virus throughout the entire country.

It was Cuomo’s callous nursing home mandate that led to the deaths of at least 6,500 nursing home/assisted living facility residents and employees in his state.

And now it’s Cuomo who has said he will actively work with other governors to “stop” Trump’s vaccine plan from being implemented. Why? Because Cuomo all but shouted from the rooftops that he’d rather the process start under a potential Biden-Harris administration so Biden (and Cuomo himself) could get the credit for a process Trump and his team fast-tracked well before Democrats and the media deliberately undermined the public’s confidence in a potential vaccine while at the same time yelling at Trump for “not doing enough.”

It’s hard to know who has disgraced themselves more throughout this pandemic: the media or Gov. Cuomo? My vote on that is for Cuomo, who arguably knows more than any governor in this country the cost of playing political games with people’s lives while a deadly virus is spreading like wildfire. And yet to this day he continues to do so.

Cuomo is not the hero here. Not in any way, shape, form or fashion.

— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —

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