STEPHANOPOULOS: But - yes, but I want to press you on that point there. What I - but I don't think there's a need to lock down. They said would I lock down the - the economy is science said so. You said that you would lock down the economy only if the scientist said it was necessary.īIDEN: But that wasn't the context. STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's look forward a little bit. He didn't do anything.Īnd to the best of my knowledge, and I mean this sincerely, I can't think of - I've been around for a lot of presidents and you know a lot of presidents in a crisis - I don't ever remember one never calling the House and Senate Republicans and Democrats together. And then what happened was when the first tranche of - the first round of money for unemployment - enhanced unemployment passed - went - went by, he didn't do anything. So you had one in five, one in six minority businesses closing, many of them permanently, people being laid off. So the Congress passed a couple trillion dollars worth of help and what happened was most of that money - significant portion of that money went to the very wealthiest corporations in the country, didn't get to the mom and pop stores. Thirdly, what we didn't do is the president had an opportunity to open and allow schools and businesses to stay open if he - they got the kind of help they needed. He worried if he talked about how bad this could be unless we took these precautionary actions then in fact the market would be done.Īnd his barometer of success of the economy is the market. He didn't talk about what needed to be done because he kept worrying, in my view, about the stock market. It is the presidential responsibility to lead. The governors can do what they need to do. Instead of leaving this up to - remember, the president said to the governors, well, they're on their own. So, what we should be doing now, there should be a national standard. Fauci, were saying, you should be taking these precautions. If you notice, from March on, I stopped doing big meetings, I started wearing masks, you know? So, it was at a time when the science was saying and his key people, Dr. That came at the end of March, and then I laid out a detailed plan relative to school openings in June and July and talked about - but you got - by that time, the science was becoming clearer and clearer of how this was spreading so rapidly.īut the president kept denying that. STEPHANOPOULOS: In January or February? Right.īIDEN: No, in January and February, no, that's correct. But there's no record of you calling for social distancing, limited social gatherings, mandatory mask. Vice President, before you go to the future, can I follow back on looking back for just a little bit? You did have an op-ed in January where you warned of the seriousness of the pandemic. It's all going to - when the heat - when summer comes, it's all going to go away like a miracle. It's going to go away by Easter, don't worry about it.
Then I wrote a piece in March about what I thought we should be doing to take hold of this, using the - there's an act that was passed a long time ago that allows the president to go into a business and say, stop making this and start making that, and took a long time for him to even institute that to get ventilators and so on.Īnd so, the point was, he missed enormous opportunities and kept saying things that weren't true. And at the time, he said he didn't tell anybody because he was afraid Americans would panic.Īmericans don't panic.
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We later learned that he knew full well how serious it was when he did an interview with George Woodward - I mean, excuse me, Bob Woodward. In addition to that, I pointed out that I thought in February, I did a piece for "USA Today" saying this is a serious problem. All those 44 people came home, never got replaced. I suggested we should be seeking, and I didn't hold public office, I was a former vice president, I suggested we, in fact, ask - to have access to the source of the problem.Īnd to the best of our knowledge, Trump never pushed that. And we had set up in our administration a pandemic office within the White House, there were 44 people on the ground.
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