Thursday on ABC’s “The View,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged the Trump administration “didn’t mobilize the first couple of weeks,” of the coronavirus pandemic.
Co-host Meghan McCain asked, “There was an article out in The New York Times this morning that talks about how all the doctors in the country this morning are writing their wills and having to change it because the people they’re close to are either too old or fellow doctors and may die. Some people have resorted to wearing garbage bags because they don’t have the right supplies or gear. I’m furious. Most Americans are furious. This seems like a referendum on many things, but especially the preparedness we have for a crisis like this. what went wrong, and what can average Americans watching in horror do to help?”
Speaking from his quarantine in Italy, Gingrich said, “I think until you’ve experienced a pandemic like this, you always discount it. Without getting into politics in the last administration when we had the H1N1 virus, we used an amazing number of masks, and they were told, you need to go out and buy a bunch of masks. They didn’t do it, so the stockpile wasn’t rebuilt.”
On the Trump administration, Gingrich said, “In this administration, I think they didn’t really they didn’t mobilize the first couple of weeks. I do a podcast every Sunday, and we had Dr. Fauci on in early February. He knew things were not going right. He knew there was this thing coming out of China, and it was dangerous. Nobody knew yet how dangerous it was going to be, and so they were sort of caught between, do we treat this like a big flu or do we treat this like a pandemic? And I think that it took a little while, and I don’t think the planning system at any level — this is not just the White House, but I think the whole planning system underestimated the scale of the conflict and how much resources it was going to take.”
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