Joe Biden hit back on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s claim that the Obama administration left the country unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic.
“This is a bunch of malarkey and you know it, @senatemajldr We left a 69-page playbook on how to fight pandemics. You can read it here if you’d like,” the former vice president tweeted Tuesday afternoon, reacting to a digital Trump campaign event in which McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, leveled the charge. “And make sure to pass along your notes to President Trump. He could use them.”
In a Team Trump Livestream with Lara Trump, a daughter-in-law of the president, McConnell said that the “Obama administration did not leave to this administration, any kind of game plan for something like this,” referring to the coronavirus.
This is a bunch of malarkey and you know it, @senatemajldr. We left a 69-page playbook on how to fight pandemics.
You can read it here if you’d like: https://t.co/zvRGv6ubWt
And make sure to pass along your notes to President Trump. He could use them. https://t.co/CooyBemPSv
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 12, 2020
Biden’s Tuesday response included a link to a March Politico article that reported the Trump administration failed to follow a guide compiled by Obama’s National Security Council, instructing what the federal government should do during a pandemic.
According to that playbook, the federal government should have began stockpiling personal protective equipment like masks and gloves for medical workers in January when China first reported cases of the coronavirus.
Biden has continually attacked Trump for the administration’s response to the coronavirus, while the president has claimed that his predecessor left him scrambling once the virus arrived in the United States.
Reports have also surfaced that the Trump administration “wasted” months at the beginning of the outbreak to stock up on N95 masks and respirators and did not start ordering medical supplies in bulk until March, leaving many hospitals desperate for necessary equipment.
In response, Trump has cited reports that the Obama administration failed to replenish its national mask stockpile after the H1N1 outbreak in 2009. That pandemic killed 12,469 people in the U.S. and hospitalized 274,304.
On Monday, Biden called Trump’s coronavirus response “childish” in a Washington Post op-ed and wrote that the economy can’t recover until the country has adequate testing.
“[Trump’s] goal is as obvious as it is craven: He hopes to split the country into dueling camps, casting Democrats as doomsayers hoping to keep America grounded and Republicans as freedom fighters trying to liberate the economy,” he wrote.
