ALBANY, New York – If you know anything about the coronavirus pandemic in New York, you know that the state desperately needs ventilators.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has almost begged the federal government to do whatever it can to deliver them or get them manufactured.
That has prompted pushback from President Donald Trump, including a claim, made last week on Fox News, that Cuomo rejected buying ventilators in favor of “death panels and lotteries.”
“He had a chance to buy, in 2015, 16,000 ventilators at a very low price and he turned it down,” the president said. “I’m not blaming him or anything else, but he shouldn’t be talking about us. He should be buying his own ventilators.”
Turns out, Trump was getting his information from a dubious source: Gateway Pundit, a right-wing opinion site that, in a recent post on Cuomo and ventilators, pointed to an obscure state report on planning for pandemics.