President Donald Trump on Tuesday again blamed the Obama administration for a bare cupboard of medical supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile but demurred when asked what he had done to restock since taking office nearly four years ago.
“We didn’t have ventilators, we didn’t have medical equipment, we didn’t have testing. The tests were broken. You saw that. We had broken tests. They left us nothing,” the president told ABC’s David Muir during an appearance on “World News Tonight.”
“And we’ve taken it and we have built an incredible stockpile — a stockpile like we’ve never had before.”
When Muir asked what Trump had done to restock those cupboards, Trump answered: “Well, I’ll be honest, I have a lot of things going on.”
“We had a lot of people that refused to allow the country to be successful. They wasted a lot of time on Russia, Russia, Russia. That turned out to be a total hoax. Then they did Ukraine, Ukraine, and that was a total hoax. Then they impeached the president of the United States for absolutely no reason, and we even had a 197-to-nothing vote by the Republicans.”
The Obama administration faced repeated crises over the span of eight years, including the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009, but failed to take significant steps to replenish the supply of N95 masks.
Medical personnel wear the respirators because they can “filter out at least 95% of airborne particles,” according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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