CNN anchor Chris Cuomo said he didn't believe his own network's reporting on the status of the vaccine distribution plan that the Biden administration inherited from the Trump administration.
Cuomo, during an interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci on his show Thursday night, said he didn't "buy" a new report from a network White House correspondent that said the Biden administration was left "starting from scratch" after the inauguration.
"Another thing that I don’t buy comes out of our reporting. I have two new pieces of reporting. The first one is that people within the administration say they’re starting from scratch with the vaccine. No, they’re not. You have an infrastructure out there that you are well aware of. It has to be improved," he stated. "They shouldn’t get any benefit of a low bar here either. You know, there is a lot going on already. Are they going to scrap it, or are they going to build on it and make it better?"
During Thursday's White House briefing, Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a prominent member of the previous and current administration's coronavirus team, pushed back on the report’s anonymous sources, who alleged the Trump administration left “nothing for us to work with” and that the team has to start from “square one.”
"We're certainly not starting from scratch, because there is activity going on in the distribution," Fauci explained.
In response to Cuomo's dismissal, Fauci reiterated that the Trump administration left them some infrastructure in place and that the Biden administration is planning to build on it.
"No. No, they’re not going to scrap it, Chris. I mean, I was involved in the development of that stuff," he said. "We’re not going to scrap that. There are a lot of good things that happened with the development of the vaccine program. I mean, Operation Warp Speed had a lot of successes. There were some missteps. But a lot of successes there. You know, we’re going to be building on things. We're not going to be destroying and putting aside, saying it's useless. We’re going to take the good parts and amplify them, make them better, and we're going to go for the goal, and that is to get as many people vaccinated as you possibly can as expeditiously as you can."
Cuomo and Fauci
