As the Biden administration bumbles its way through the coronavirus crisis, some members of former President Donald Trump’s COVID team have begun to call out their successors for misrepresenting what they were handed.
“I’m sitting on the couch a week after leaving office. And I’m watching the president on some CNN town hall. And he literally said, quote, ‘You know, when we came in, we didn’t have a vaccine,’” said former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday.
“We were vaccinating a million Americans a day when we left office, including Joe Biden,” he added while hosting his American Freedom podcast for the Young America’s Foundation.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, talking to Pence on the podcast, said that he was upset also when Ron Klain, White House chief of staff, said the new administration was handed a “mess.”
Redfield, who has begun to be more outspoken about the successes of the Trump team, said, “I got very upset with the chief of staff, his chief of staff, because he said that we handed him a ‘mess,’ is the word he used, a mess, and that they were going to get to a million a day within no time.”
He added, “You know, I usually don’t say anything, but I had to say I was very disappointed. Rather than congratulating us for the football that we handed them right and take it further. Because when we handed him the football, we were already doing a million a day.”
Both expressed dismay that the Biden team not only did not credit the former administration for having the crisis as under control as possible, but that in not thanking those who helped, it depressed morale on the COVID team left behind.
Also joining Pence on Friday was Paul Mango, the former Health and Human Services aide who has just written a book about the virus battle, Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds, due out in early summer.
He described the Biden team as uninterested in finding out what the Trump COVID team had done. For example, Biden’s transition team never attended COVID meetings, though it tuned in at times on Zoom.
“On the second floor of the Humphrey Building, which was the headquarters of HHS, it was also where the hub of Operation Warp Speed and the whole COVID response was, we set up all those cubicles and all those conference rooms. They didn’t show up once, not a single person showed up,” he told Pence, who was the head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force that also led Operation Warp Speed.
“They never interviewed Secretary Alex Azar,” he said, adding, “Can you imagine a commander in the middle of a raging battle being — you know, a change of command, and a new general is coming in, and he doesn’t talk to the existing one?”
What’s more, said Redfield, guidance about masks and vaccines has changed so often from the Biden team that the public is dizzied and has given up.
