New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s letter to Pfizer asking if his state could purchase coronavirus vaccines directly from the company could cause more problems than it solves, a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID Advisory Board told CNBC’s “The News with Sheppard Smith.”
Dr. Celine Gounder said on Monday evening that “Cuomo, himself, had said back in the spring that the situation around ventilators was essentially ‘one big eBay’ with all of the states bidding against one another for ventilators, and I think this kind of an approach to vaccine allocation is going to result, frankly, in the same kind of situation that he, himself, was criticizing last spring.”
Gounder made the comments as part of a harsh criticism of the Trump administration as states struggle to get the vaccine doses they need.
“I think we’ve already had too much of a patchwork response across the states,” she said.
Cuomo complained that the federal government is sending his state 50,000 fewer doses of the vaccine than the previous week at the same time that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded vaccine eligibility to anyone over the age of 65.
Gounder also commented on Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar's criticism that the Biden administration’s goal of 100 million shots in arms in the first 100 days would be be “a tragic squandering of the opportunity that we have handed them.”
Gounder replied that “We’ve seen, though, that one, distribution is very different from getting shots in arms, that that last mile of delivery is really the hardest part here.”
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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