News
Featured Image
WILMINGTON, DE - AUGUST 12: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) arrive to deliver remarks at the Alexis Dupont High School on August 12, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

November 18, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – As former Vice President Joe Biden prepares to assume the presidency of the United States in January, he is accusing current President Donald Trump of risking more COVID-19 deaths by refusing to cooperate with Biden’s transition team.

“More people may die if we don’t coordinate. Look, as my chief of staff Ron Klain would say, who handled ebola, a vaccine is important,” Biden told NBC News on Monday, the Daily Caller reports. “It’s of little use until you’re vaccinated. How do we get over 300 million Americans vaccinated? What’s the game plan? It’s a huge, huge, huge undertaking to get it done, prioritize those most in need, and also cooperate with the World Health Organization and the rest of the world in dealing with this.”

“If we have to wait until January 20th to start that planning, it puts us behind over a month, month and a half,” he went on. “So it’s important that it be done, that there be coordination now. Now or as rapidly as we can get that done.”

Trump has not yet conceded the election to Biden, pending the final outcome of recounts and legal challenges to ballot irregularities in a handful of states. But the Trump administration says it has already settled on agreements with 60% of pharmacies in every state so far to distribute COVID-19 vaccines for free.

Further, refusal to cooperate with an opponent’s transition team until a disputed election has been certified is not unprecedented. The General Services Administration must formally “ascertain” a winner before federal transition funds are released; after the bitterly-contested 2000 election, the GSA under the Clinton administration did not do so for President George W. Bush until December 14, the day after former Vice President Al Gore finally conceded.

Despite laying the blame for America’s 253,875 recorded COVID-19 deaths at Trump’s feet throughout the campaign, the actual plan Biden laid out for tackling the virus was largely indistinguishable from actions the Trump administration was already taking. Biden’s COVID strategy advisor Michael Osterholm recently claimed America “could lock down for four to six weeks” to “drive the numbers down,” during which the federal government “could pay for a package right now to cover all of the lost wages for individual workers.”

Additionally, Breitbart notes that Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself inadvertently undermined claims that a delayed transition would hurt the country by noting that Biden, “having been the vice president of the United States and the chairman of the foreign affairs committee and the chairman of the judiciary committee, he knows the territory, so he’s going to be just fine in the transition.”

Several Biden picks have shed light on what a Biden administration will look like recently, from the aforementioned Klain, who has declared himself a “soldier” for abortion-on-demand, to transition chief for government-owned media Richard Stengel, who has advocated a federal “hate speech” law.