Thursday on MSNBC, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) said President Donald Trump not implementing a nationwide mask policy was “allowing politics,” to let Americans die.
Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “How much of this is on Donald Trump? How of this is his failure?”
Cuomo said, “Well, without getting into politics, by the federal government’s own admission, Nicolle, they did a report today from the CDC that is damning. The CDC report today says what we believed in New York, that the virus first came to New York from Europe. They traced the viral strain, and the CDC says their travel ban was too late. By the time they did the China travel ban and the European travel ban that the president likes to tout, the virus was already in New York and had been circulating. That was the first mistake. The federal government that was supposed to protect our public health and homeland security failed. That’s how the virus came the first time. There’s going to be a second failure, which is now all this explosion across the rest of the country was totally predictable. We still don’t have the operation set up. We’re going to see that infection comes back to New York and reinfect New York unless we’re very lucky. It’s not only the first failure that allowed the virus to come. It’s the second failure that four months later, we’re still talking about eight days to get testing results.”
Wallace said, “For all of the tragedy and strain on our hospitals and our city and our state, are you surprised to see governors like Governor Kemp twiddling his thumbs about something like a mask which is the lease invasive sort of the least offensive way to slow the spread?”
Cuomo said, “Nicolle, that we’re still talking about masks is indefensible. You have the IHME projection model, which is the model that the White House follows. It’s funded by Gates. They say 40,000 more Americans will die because we didn’t have a mask policy. Forty thousand people will die because we didn’t have a mask policy? Every health expert says it. Every federal health expert says it. The CDC says it. The NIH says it. That we’re allowing politics to allow Americans to die is a level of dysfunction that we haven’t seen in this country before.”
He added, “Look, we know what the real virus is. The virus that we are dealing with is not the COVID virus. It’s the virus of American division and partisanship and the virus of government incompetence. That’s what this nation is dealing with. That’s the pandemic. The division and government incompetence. We have to recognize it, treat it with science. We have to unify. Otherwise, we’ll never defeat this virus.”
Story cited here.
