New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told Good Morning America on Monday morning that while the development of an effective coronavirus vaccine was “good news,” it was “bad news” that it would arrive while President Donald Trump is in office.
Cuomo was reacting to news that Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine had proven more than 90% effective. Stock market futures soared, and President Donald Trump welcomed the news exuberantly. Former Vice President Joe Biden, whom the media have declared the winner of the election, warned Americans that it would be “many more months” before they received it.
Cuomo went further, lamenting the timing of the announcement, because Trump would be managing the vaccine rollout:
George Stephanopoulos: 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, George. 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. … 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.
Cuomo provided no evidence for his assertion that communities would be “left out” by the vaccine distribution under the Trump administration.
Asked what Biden would do differently, Cuomo struggled to answer, saying that the Trump administration focused on the private sector rather than the government.
He added: “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.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.