Remember when former President Donald J Trump was labeled the bad guy by the establishment media and the political left – particularly for his response to the COVID-19 pandemic? Well, three years and a sham of a presidential election later, guess who was just proved right…
Yep, it’s Trump.
The not-so-surprising revelation comes to us as New York City has secretly sold off or literally scrapped millions of dollars worth of pandemic equipment that was never really needed or even used.
According to a recent report by the nonprofit NYC digital outlet The City, the Big Apple recently auctioned off over $200 million in COVID gear, most of which was completely unused. Of course, the liberal-led city didn’t get nearly as much out of the gear as they paid. And what they couldn’t sell, they gave away.
You might remember that during the early days of the pandemic, there were two major voices on the arrival of the vastly unknown disease. From New York, we heard a daily and overly long briefing from then-governor Andrew Cuomo. For many, he seemed to be the voice of reason.
While he spoke of great disaster being at our door, he also promised that we would get through it, provided, of course, that his state and NYC, in particular (as the epicenter of the virus in the US) were given the proper equipment and gear.
His opposite was President Trump. That is not to say that Trump didn’t allow COVID to be treated as an emergency or as an excuse to spend a whole lot of taxpayer dollars. But he often took the requests of those such as Cuomo and questioned their necessity a bit.
You know, like Cuomo’s demand for ventilators in the state.
As one Politico article noted at the time, Cuomo insisted that his state needed at least 30,000 high-quality ventilators. He really wanted closer to 40,000. But Trump was remised in giving into that request, saying that he didn’t believe many would be needed.
He remarked that entire hospitals often survived on a mere two ventilators in the whole facility. To him, it seemed a bit rash for there to now be tens of thousands given to those hospitals.
As he said in one appearance on Fox News, “I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be.”
Of course, Cuomo was furious at Trump’s denial of his request, essentially saying that Trump was sentencing innocent citizens to death by doing so. (Never mind that Cuomo did the same by sending known COVID-positive patients back to nursing homes to infect the state’s most at-risk population). But I digress…
Looking back now, it’s obvious that it was Trump who was right – especially since so many ventilators and such were just sold off unused.
As The City reported, NYC made about $500,000 off those sales, a mere fraction of what they were originally bought for. This included $12 million in ventilators bought by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, recently sold for a not-so-whopping $24,600.
The sales also included many unused bridge vents sold as “non-functioning medical equipment sold as scrap metal.”
Now, of course, city government officials have been rather quiet on these sales. The City actually obtained prices from private auction houses.
Also reported was that the COVID equipment that didn’t sell was given away to nations like Ghana, Haiti, Indonesia, South Africa, and Ukraine.
Even more embarrassing for the city is that many of these unnecessary items the city paid for were never received or were faulty.
As the outlet reported, the new NYC Comptroller Brad Lander has uncovered a series of medical equipment acquisitions by de Blasio that bypassed the former comptroller (Scott Stringer) and his ability to vet the vendors they were coming from.
As a result, NYC ended up paying millions for “defective goods or supplies that were never delivered.”
Now, all those “goods” were sold for barely half of $1 million, making the bad guy right again.
