Trump’s Misleading Ventilator Counter-Punch at Cuomo
Hitting back at New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pleas for the federal government to provide more ventilators, President Donald Trump misleadingly claimed Cuomo rejected a 2015 recommendation to purchase 15,000 ventilators and instead “established death panels” and “lotteries.”
Contrary to the president’s claim, a task force in 2015 did not make a recommendation about purchasing more ventilators. The report — “Ventilator Allocation Guidelines” — provided guidelines for New York hospitals on how they should decide which patients get ventilators in the event of a severe influenza pandemic.
The coronavirus pandemic has exploded in New York, where nearly half of the more than 81,000 confirmed cases in the U.S. were located, as of March 26.
Cuomo said at a press conference on March 24 that the state had an urgent need for more ventilators to deal with an anticipated peak in demand in two weeks for patients needing help to breathe. The state will need at least 30,000 ventilators, he said, and it so far had obtained 7,000.
“There is no other way for us to get these ventilators,” Cuomo said. “We’ve tried everything else. The only way we can obtain these ventilators is from the federal government. Period.”
Cuomo said the federal government had, to that point, only provided an additional 400 ventilators, though Vice President Mike Pence said in an interview on Fox News later that day that the federal government would be sending 4,000 more to New York in the next two days.
Cuomo ‘Rejected’ Ventilator Recommendation?
Speaking at a hours after Cuomo made his comments, Trump said that despite Cuomo’s “complaining,” the federal government was “doing probably more — definitely more for [New York] — than
