New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is looking to have ventilators built right in New York City in order to build up a reserve and protect the city during future pandemics. “We’ve learned the hard way that we cannot depend on the federal government,” claimed de Blasio said during his daily press briefing. “We’ll purchase what we need and create a stockpile. We New Yorkers will take care of ourselves.”
It was a bizarre announcement, considering that, according to President Trump, the United States is already on track to build as many as 200,000 ventilators in 2020, which is significantly higher than the 30,000 that were built in 2019. So, why is Mayor de Blasio blaming the federal government and claiming he can’t depend on them? Is New York City experiencing a ventilator shortage? We can confidently say that they are now. Why? Because less than a week ago, New York Governor Cuomo announced that the coronavirus situation in New York had stabilized and that they had more ventilators than they needed. In fact, he said New York would be sharing ventilators with other states that needed them more.
New York will be sending ventilators to other states now that its coronavirus response is stabilizing. 100 will go to Michigan and 50 to Maryland.
"We will be there for you," Cuomo says https://t.co/9T8aUPjUrs pic.twitter.com/pJcL7crN9V
— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 15, 2020
Not only did New York not need the 40,000 ventilators Cuomo requested from Trump, but the amount they had was more than they ultimately needed. Yet, Bill de Blasio, who’s trying to cover up for his own failures to contain the spread of the virus in New York City, is trying to blame the federal government (read: President Trump) for failing to provide enough ventilators and other equipment.
“New York City needs its own strategic reserve because we can’t depend on the federal government at this point,” de Blasio said. If de Blasio really needs more ventilators, Governor Cuomo wouldn’t be giving them away to other states.
That said, New York City should have its own strategic reserve, but not because they couldn’t rely on the federal government, the federal government managed the ventilator situation quite effectively, giving states ventilators based on their actual need rather than the bogus numbers governors were requesting based on the original doomsday models.
I think it’s obvious that de Blasio wants to deflect blame away from himself so people will forget that he’s the one didn’t shutdown schools when he should have, that it was he and other NYC health officials who weren’t taking the coronavirus seriously early on. To date, the Metro and MTA buses are still running, making it easy for the coronavirus to spread.
Sorry, Bill, the failure of NYC and downstate New York to contain and mitigate the virus is on you.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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