Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) admitted Thursday that his statements about the Obama administration failing to leave a plan for handling a pandemic were untrue.
“I was wrong. They did leave behind a plan, so I clearly made a mistake in that regard,” McConnell said in a Fox News interview.
McConnell had claimed on Monday that the Obama administration had no “game plan” for dealing with a pandemic during a Trump campaign online chat with the President’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
“They claim pandemics only happen once every hundred years but what if that’s no longer true? We want to be early, ready for the next one, because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this,” McConnell had said.
The Obama administration’s National Security Council had left detailed guidelines for Trump on how to respond to a pandemic. The guide, Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents, was first reported on by Politico in March.
The playbook includes step-by-step advice on questions that should be asked and details the responsibilities of various federal agencies in combatting a pandemic. It also lists coronaviruses as a pathogen that could require a federal-level response.
McConnell said Thursday that “as to whether or not the plan was followed and who’s the critic and all the rest, I don’t have any observation about that because I don’t know enough about the details of that to comment on it in any detail.”
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