(DCWatchdog.com) – Mike Pence has blasted Joe Biden and his Cabinet for “dropping the ball” on the COVID-19 pandemic after the Trump administration left it all the necessary tools to fight the virus that came from Communist China.
Pence, who is running for the 2024 presidential nomination of the Republican Party against his former boss, Donald Trump, appeared on the Newsmax program “America Right Now.”
“It’s remarkable to think that that the Biden administration, in their first year of COVID, tragically lost more Americans to the COVID pandemic, [even] with all of the tools that we left behind, than we lost in a year when we began with no tools whatsoever,” the former vice president declared.
In his view, the Biden administration did everything wrong with its vaccination mandates and inability to provide sufficient medicines and testing.
“They defaulted into vaccine mandates, and they dropped the ball on testing. They dropped the ball on therapeutics, so there’s a lot of lessons to be learned,” Pence stated.
“But I took the team that I was handed and I believe we worked hard to save lives all year long, and I believe we did,” he added.
The former vice president was asked whether he would have axed Dr. Anthony Fauci or at least restricted his power during the coronavirus pandemic.
Fauci, the White House Chief Medical Advisor and head of the National Institute on Allergies and Infectious Diseases, retired at the end of 2022.
Pence responded that by the time he was tapped to head the White House Coronavirus Task Force at the end of February 2020, then-President Donald Trump had appointed Fauci to it.
“The people I added to the task force were people like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, our chief economic adviser, because I knew that whatever we had to go through in the short term, we would want to have the policies to see our economy through it and bring our economy back,” the former vice president explained.
He added that Fauci gradually “became more of a champion of some of the authoritarian policies of Democrat governors.”
“Especially after Joe Biden, as a candidate, said he was essentially going to put Dr. Fauci in charge, it seemed like things changed with him dramatically,” Pence pointed out regarding Fauci.
