President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid Advisory Board member Dr. Celine Gounder slammed the Trump administration’s piecemeal Covid response as some states across the U.S. scramble to get the vaccine doses they need.
“I think we’ve already had too much of a patchwork response across the states,” Gounder said in a Monday evening interview on “The News with Shepard Smith.”
In a Friday coronavirus briefing, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the federal government is sending his state 50,000 fewer doses of the vaccine than the week before. The state was getting fewer doses as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded vaccine eligibility to anyone over the age of 65 on Jan. 12.
On Monday, Cuomo sent a letter to Pfizer asking if the state of New York could buy vaccines directly from the company. Last week, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made a similar request to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
Gounder told host Shepard Smith that this approach could cause more problems than it solves.
“I think Governor 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