New York Governor Cuomo has been fairly critical of the response by the Trump administration regarding the coronavirus.
However, a new report has surfaced that shows one of the major challenges for New York, a shortage of ventilators, is traced back to a 2015 decision made by Cuomo.
Big Brother Help
In addition to the national stockpile, every state should have its stockpiles for emergencies such as this.
As conservatives, we preach less government all the time, which means states need to be more self-sufficient.
But, yes, in times of emergency, all those federal taxes we pay do need to be put to work, but this should only happen after the state exhausts its resources or comes close to it.
We have seen both Governor Cuomo and New York City Mayor de Blasio blame Trump for a lot during this crisis and the New York Times today put out a headline blatantly accusing Trump of allowing New Yorkers to die.
New York, however, was ill-prepared for what is happening today.
On March 19, the New York Post’s Betsy McCaughey published a report outlining how in 2015, Governor Cuomo declined to buy additional ventilators even though an internal study revealed the state’s stockpile was far less than required to serve the state if a pandemic happened.
The report stated that the state was short some 16,000 ventilators, which could have been purchased for $36,000 each.
We have seen the same problem in our national stockpiles under the Obama administration.
For instance, both Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times recently reported that our N95 mask supply was short roughly 100 million masks due to the fact the supply was never replenished after the H1N1 outbreak (read our full report on this, click here).
Should the Trump administration have caught this problem? We could absolutely make that case, but we would also have to bring up the point that the Obama administration used a federally funded task force to make recommendations about how to be better prepared for a pandemic.
Within the recommendations was the replenishment of our national stockpile of masks… but it was never done.
The reality of this is that both the federal and state governments were not ready for this pandemic but the full weight of the blame surely does not fall in the lap of Donald Trump and this administration.
When this is all over, there will be more than enough blame to spread around but I think it goes without saying, we are going to see measures that could have been taken as far back as 2010 that were not, putting us into a situation where we now have automobile manufacturers making ventilators and distilleries making hand sanitizer.
Maybe, just maybe, if everyone had been doing their jobs after the H1N1 outbreak and looking forward rather than pinching pennies or looking to kick the can down the road, this mass shortage we are now seeing would not be happening.
Source: New York Post
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