Did Gov. Cuomo Reject a Recommendation in 2015 to Buy 16,000 Ventilators for a Possible Pandemic?

Not exactly.

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During the Fox News coronavirus town hall Tuesday, President Trump claimed that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had refused to buy 16,000 ventilators for epidemic preparedness in 2015.

“New York Gov. Cuomo rejected buying recommended 16,000 ventilators in 2015 for the pandemic—for a pandemic, established death panels and lotteries instead,” Trump read from notes. He appears to have been reading the headline of an article published Sunday by Gateway Pundit, a frequent amplifier of false and misleading information, which used an article by Betsy McCaughey, lieutenant governor of New York from 1995 to 1998, as the basis for the piece.

Trump continued: “[Cuomo] had a chance to buy in 2015, 16,000 ventilators at a very low price and he turned it down.”

“He had 16,000 ventilators that he could have had at a great price and he didn’t buy them,” he said again at another point.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Madeline

    Thank you. I’ll check out Politifact.

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  2. DRHanson

    Is there a way we can suggest topics for future fact checks? I've tried to find a place on the website to do that, but so far haven't found a way to contact Alec with suggestions.

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      Alec Dent vertical-nib Author

      Feel free to email topics to me at alec@thedispatch.com!

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    Moshow

    Ding... add one more notch to the hypocrisy of Trump’s “FAKE NEWS”

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      Idontdocute

      Does it matter. Really, does it even matter now?

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  4. Jeffrey Gegler

    Let’s not let Cuomo off the hook so easily, even if Trump’s comments were not all true.

    We need to stop framing natural disasters in “What is the Federal government doing?” As a result of 911 and then Katrina, the Federal government stressed placing disaster mitigation, prevention, and response on local communities and the states. They are all required to have all-hazards emergency management plans that include what will be needed, MOAs with other public and private entities to get what they need, etc. This includes training. If you need more nurses trained to use ventilators, train them. The Feds cannot do this, but will provide money if it is a need in their EMPs. It is impossible for the Feds to meet the needs of every community in this country after a disaster. It cannot know what Harlan, Kentucky and Cleveland, Ohio will need. How many dump trucks and where do you get them if a tornado rips through Harlan? How many ventilators would Syracuse, NY need in a pandemic? Only locals can know that. I wrote training for DHS/FEMA, including in isolation and quarantine and pandemics, and it was delivered free across the country. Too many communities did not bother. They write “just get it done” EMPs and then complain when they need them but are junk.

    If NY needs more ventilators and people trained to use them, that’s squarely on Cuomo. “The report came from the previous administration” does not cut it.

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    1. Vermin8

      I see your point.
      It appears that Cuomo did what the governor before him did - ie, say the possibility of that bad a pandemic was unlikely ergo, no reason to procure more ventilators.
      It may be that this was not an outrageous decision based the data and projections they had in 2008-15.
      But in 2020 we can say that they could have procured more (maybe not the total amount) but decided to the contrary. That is the fact (unless they did buy a few more)- whether or not it was wise given the situation in 2015 is a matter of opinion.

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        Stephanie

        But--can a governor force hospitals, who operate on a slim margin, to purchase expensive medical technology, on the very slight chance that the worst case scenario of a pandemic occurs, in the time before that equipment becomes technologically outdated? Under what authority This whole idea that Cuomo somehow made a wrong decision 5 years ago, is so absurd.

        Can we just put the focus back on Trump. He is STILL inexcusably minimizing both the pandemic and his role in it. He's not governing. He never stopped campaigning.

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    2. Robert Waters

      None of which makes the president's statement true.

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      1. Jeffrey Gegler

        Which I clearly stated.

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        1. Robert Waters

          Not nearly as clear as all that, and beside the point, The point is that nobody is suggesting that Gov. Cuomo is blameless, but only that the statement Mr. Trump made is another of his trademark lies. The article did not try to let the governor off the hook.

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      tallcupofcoffee

      I'm doubtful you've read the entire article. And I don't think any party will be let off the hook easily.

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      1. Jeffrey Gegler

        Of course I did.

        Cuomo’s entire defense, which this piece did not challenge, was that the report came out in 2008 and did not call for more ventilators because there was not enough trained staff.

        Train them.

        In an occasion like this, it’s all hands on deck and your average nurse has the skills to fill the void. They only need the training, which should have been done and was not. Every administration since at least 2008 is culpable.

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          Stephanie

          So--Trump is trying to get away with a lie about Cuomo blowing off the chance to get 16,000 ventilators "at a great price." That was what is being fact checked.

          You are going off on a tangent about training nurses. Quite likely, the additional nurses HAVE been trained and on-boarded, for all you know. Yet you are stating as if you do know, that the training was not done? Where's your proof?

          And Cuomo doesn't buy the ventilators, by the way. Individual hospitals purchase them.

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        Richard Maxton

        Well I read the whole article and I am in agreement with Jeffrey. Neither the President nor the Governor were wholly responsible for the failures at the various levels of government. But as the current heads of those governments the blame will fall at their feet (as it should - heavy is the head and all that).
        I'd love to see more emphasis on the nightly news on the role of local (state level and below) government in managing the crises. We're FAR off the beaten path when we look to the federal level for the answer to everything.
        The most salient point of this article (IMHO) is the fact that vents alone wouldn't fix the issue. Gotta have the appropriately trained staff to do the job. So many of the arguments I'm seeing hyperfocus on one "MAGIC" thing that one side or another didn't do right that would have fixed / prevented the WHOLE PROBLEM (insert scoff here).

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          Stephanie

          Let's have MUCH more focus on the role of the federal government and more focus on what the governors are facing. The federal government has the means to get GM or 3M etc. to ramp up production of the equipment and products that are short, and Trump has been dilly dallying on this under yesterday, forcing the states to compete for a dwindling supply, waiting for the governors to praise him, in effect demanding a quid pro quo.
          Of course it's part of his little game, politicizing a pandemic, by manipulating the situation so a lot of people who really think he's incompetent (including those doctors who stand with him at his rally conferences) will praise him in public in order to just stay in the game, and get his approval rating by uninformed people to go up.

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    Earl King

    So, again I must quibble a bit. There is context to the whole "the Trump administration failed to provide for ventilators due to the inaction in February thing.. The total number of Covid-19 patients on March 1st was 75. So, not such a scary headline. In February the WHO was still telling the world there was no human to human to human contact. Add to that, in February the Impeachment consumed ALL the air in the room. Trump is intuitively correct, states purchase their own equipment. But I say this as a nod to all politicians. America is basically broke..We have no reserve. Every year gimmicks help state budget come in line...There is no additional money for 400 or 4000 or 40,000 ventilators. That is why he didn't buy them at any price. We also don't have that many Respiratory Therapists. Your avg. size hospital might have 2 to 4 on a shift. There is no warehouse of 40,000 respirators sitting around waiting for the next pandemic. No way to know if Cuomo was offered 16k at a great price. NY generates a tremendous amount of tax revenue and has many programs that Progressives love..they costs billions. $102 billion to be exact. How much is wasted on the inefficient MTA which like our Post Office can't break even.. Anyway...The Flu happens. We'e had Swine, SARS and MERS, all in a relatively short period of time. Maybe we can discuss it now...But we just simply let old people die every year from the flu...We don't stack warehouses with 40,000 ventilators...So pardon me for pointing out the hypocrisy of everybody.

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      Stephanie

      On the other hand, there was a whole pandemic playbook written up several years ago by the NSC, which modeled exactly the situation we're having now and early planning explicitly mentioned manufacturing and stockpiling ventilators--right around the point that Trump was told by Alex Azar about the impending likely pandemic--and changed the subject to flavored vaping products. Let's not lose sight of the many lost opportunities to use expertise at hand, because the president thinks he knows more than anyone else.

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      Idontdocute

      The WHO situation reports in 26-27 January were discussing the possibility of asymptotic carriers increasing the number of infections to obvious human to human transfer. If I could get completely stockpiled by early to mid February, someone in the federal government could have done their job, started making some phone calls and figured out a plan to fall into place.

      I haven't seen too many old people left to die of the flu, I have often seen families and patients decline aggressive treatment. You are in New York. Do you honestly believe that families are gathering around the bedside of the loved one weighing the pros and cons of continued treatments and care before concluding that palliative route would be acceptable in New York right now? How about when that bullet train hits with doubling cases in about every 3 days? No more stairway to heaven, no more with a word they can get what they came for. Just like every flu season.

      By the by, do you have to brush up on your armband colors as well for triage? I am sure we do that every flu season as well.

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        Earl King

        During the 2017-2018 Flu Season I've read that 80,000 Americans died...this was one of worst Flu seasons. Reports are this year will be around 50,000. I did not get dispatched to one Flu Symptom call that I can remember. We get calls for Breathing Problems. We see Congestive Heart Failure, COPD, Pneumonia. Most people do not call 911 for a Cold or Flu...now they are. BTW they are tags...and they are more for mass Trauma calls. Shootings, Bombings, Building collapses.... The job of the first EMS person is to triage. Black is dead, Red is critical, Green usually refers to walking injured or non injured.

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          Idontdocute

          The test for flu isn't given until you are in the ED or on the floor and the deaths are probably listed as sepsis, pneumonia, or respiratory failure secondary to influenza. I would imagine that you now have 40 year olds calling when they get a tight chest and cough and maybe don't take an antihistamine first because it being allergy season isn't on top of their minds right now.

          They said 18 people died last night in one hospital there of covid 19. I don't remember that happening during flu season in my twenty plus years. I am fairly certain at this rate we will more than pass that 80,000.

          BTW. The triage that I am referring to is in the 2005 pandemic report listed in this article, but you're right, yours would be more for mass events. (Hopefully you don't get any abandoned senior homes like they had in Spain) Mine will probably be a new reality for a large number of people, esp. those who are use to with a word being able to get what they came for. Actually, this might just be a new reality for almost all of us.

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            Earl King

            I am hearing for example the Medical Directer for a small paid town EMS squad allowing them to refuse transport to someone who is not sick enough to go to ED...esp. just because they are scared. We need every system to do this.

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    Madeline

    Very happy you clarified the whole story. Suggestion for a future Fact Check: Trump has blamed President Obama for essentially leaving him a response system that didn’r work. Can you clarify what thw whohle story is on that?

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      Stephanie

      You might find the answer to your question in some articles that explained exactly what happened to that pandemic planning directorate that Obama set up after Ebola, that Trump and Bolton disbanded (actually the staff was all reassigned to different jobs and some of the principals quit, leaving a shell operation with no institutional memory). There's a video clip of Trump explaining why as a businessman, he didn't see any sense in having all those people around if there wasn't a pandemic because they could just ad-hoc it when the time came, which was on Twitter about the time he claimed he never heard about the pandemic directorate being disbanded. I think Politifact might have covered this.

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      1. Mr. Tapeguy

        That's at best a half-truth.

        While it's true that saying he didn't remember was dumb and he did think he could perhaps ad-hoic it, that's not the whole story.

        First of all, the pandemic teams were disbanded and reassembled twice before Trump ever took office: one under GWBush, then resurrected by Tom Ridge, then again by Obama right after he took office and he didn't put it back together until AFTER the eBola epidemic several years later. So apparently everyone thinks that can ad-hoc it. We've been warned since 2003 that we might be unprepared for a pandemic, so this should have been a focus long ago.

        It was generally believed, including by former Defense Secy Robert Gates, that the entire department including the NSC was bloated and needed trimming. Under Trump, the team was then rearranged by Bolton but not assigned "different jobs." They operated more interdepartmentally but it didn't change their primary focus. The guy who actually ran the office was pretty clear about that and disputes your claims that they were essentially wandering around in the desert with no direction. Even Politifact rated Biden's claim along those lines as not the full story.

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          Stephanie

          Irrelevant: anything that happened in previous administrations, since the crises Obama was president during were handled competently. But any smart executive would put into place a plan to manage the next one.

          And there was one guy who claimed in a WaPo editorial that Trump did not disband the pandemic directorate, because, he claimed, he was part of it. That was fact-checked and found to be false. The proof is: there was none in existence in January this year when it should've been taking charge of the problem. So that guy was misinforming the public.

          Whether the NSC was "bloated" or notl and who thought so (or didn't), has nothing to do with the price of eggs.

          This has been mismanaged colossally and it needs to be repeated frequently and widely, as Trump is trying to now spin it that he's been some sort of hero, and right wing media is lying along with him.

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          1. Mr. Tapeguy

            Not irrelevant.

            First of all, precedents were set. Blaming Trump alone for the mistakes made by at least two of his predecessors is short-sighted, although not unexpected. I guess they aren't as obnoxious as he is, but that's not what we're discussing here.

            Second, according to CNN (not known for being big Trump apologists) and other sources In at least 10 government reports from 2003 to 2015 indicated that we were likely to have a shortage of ventilators and nothing changed. That also is not Trump's fault, and in fact, predates him.

            Who exactly "fact-checked" Tim Morrison's editorial and found it false? Please provide a source, because he didn't claim the office hadn't been technically "dissolve" nor was everyone fired; he simply pointed out that it had been restructured. That's exactly what happened. John Bolton said the same thing.

            That's why the Washington Post, also not known for its love of Trump, rated Joe Biden's claim along the lines of yours "not the whole story," which is exactly what I stated above.

            How much staff is at the NSC has a lot to do with the way the department is managed including budgeting and staffing. That's true for any business or government agency and it's common sense.

            And as you seem fond of saying, whether or not Trump takes responsibility for his mistakes (which he won't), has nothing to do with the price of eggs. You can blame him for his shortcomings, which are manifold, and buy into every headline about how everything he does is an earth-shattering colossal failure, even when he leaves the toilet seat up. That doesn't mean it's all true or solely his responsibility.

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