President Donald Trump says he's questioning New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's call for 30,000 ventilators to care for the patients hit hardest by coronavirus, commenting that he does not believe that many are needed.
“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in a phone interview Thursday night. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You know, you go into major hospitals sometimes they’ll have two ventilators, and now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”
His comments came shortly after a report in The New York Times that the White House has canceled a planned announcement that General Motors and Ventec Life Systems had formed a partnership to produce up to 80,000 ventilators. According to government officials, the announcement was canceled after the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said it needs more time to assess a price tag of more than $1 billion for the project, including several hundred million dollars that would be paid upfront to General Motors to retool its Kokomo, Ind., car parts plant.
Trump did not mention the General Motors announcement, but he told Hannity that ventilators are "sort of like buying a car" because the "good ones are very, very expensive."
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio Friday accused Trump on ABC's "Good Morning America" of "not looking at the facts."
“When the president says the state of New York doesn’t need 30,000 ventilators, with all due respect to him, he’s not looking at the facts of this astronomical growth of this crisis,” de Blasio said. "And a ventilator... means someone lives or dies.”
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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