Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday apologized and acknowledged that he made a mistake when he said earlier this week that the Obama administration didn’t leave behind a “game plan” for a pandemic.
“I was wrong,” McConnell said when asked about his comments during a Fox News interview.
“They did leave behind a plan. I clearly made a mistake in that regard,” he said.
“As to whether or not the plan was followed and who is 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,” he added.
According to NBC News, McConnell’s comments come after he appeared to blame the Obama administration for not leaving guidelines behind for President Donald Trump’s White House during the transition in 2017.
“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 said during a Trump campaign event with Lara Trump.
His comments sparked a backlash from former Obama administration officials.
Ronald Klain, who was the Ebola coordinator for the Obama administration, in a tweet said that “we literally left them a 69-page Pandemic Playbook…. that they ignored.”
“And an office called the Pandemic Preparedness Office… that they abolished. And a global monitoring system called PREDICT .. that they cut by 75%” he added.
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