Former President Barack Obama said he gave ex-President Donald Trump a pandemic playbook when Trump took office — but he disregarded it.
“He ignored it,” Obama said during a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Las Vegas on Saturday. “And three years later, a pandemic hits.”
He said the Covid-19 pandemic was a “generational pandemic” and that any president would have had a hard time before noting how the United States’ death rate compared to countries like Canada that responded proactively to the global outbreak.
“But if you look at a country like Canada, their per capita death rate was 40% lower than it was here in the United States. So just do the math. That’s more than 400,000 people,” Obama said. “People’s grandmothers, people’s fathers, people’s moms who would have been alive if Donald Trump had just paid attention and tried to follow the plan that we gave him.”
He continued, saying it does matter and makes a difference to have a president who is “competent,” “cares about you” and “listens to people who are experts in these areas.”
“If you hear somebody say it doesn’t matter, it does matter,” Obama added. “And at some point, it will make a difference to them.”
In early 2020, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican, Kentucky) claimed that the Obama administration didn’t leave any pandemic playbook. Soon after that, Ronald Klain, the White House Ebola response coordinator from October 2014 to February 2015, posted the playbook on social media, while Nicole Lurie, an Obama administration official, confirmed its existence.
“To say there was no playbook was ridiculous,” Lurie told PBS in 2020.