The Biden administration, after taking office in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, "dropped the ball" after the previous administration left it with the tools to keep up with the fight, former Vice President Mike Pence, who is campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination, told Newsmax on Saturday.
"It's remarkable to think that that the Biden administration, in their first year of COVID, tragically lost more Americans to the COVID pandemic, [even] with all of the tools that we left behind, than we lost in a year when we began with no tools whatsoever," Pence said on Newsmax's "America Right Now."
Instead, under President Joe Biden, "they defaulted into vaccine mandates, and they dropped the ball on testing," said Pence. "They dropped the ball on therapeutics, so there's a lot of lessons to be learned. But I took the team that I was handed and I believe we worked hard out to save lives all year long, and I believe we did."
Meanwhile, when Pence was asked if he would have fired Dr. Anthony Fauci or limited his role during the pandemic, the former vice president noted that when he was tapped to lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force at the end of February 2020, then-President Donald Trump had already appointed Fauci to the task force some months earlier.
"The people I added to the task force were people like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, our chief economic adviser, because I knew that whatever we had to go through in the short term, we would want to have the policies to see our economy through it and bring our economy back," Pence said.
But as the process continued, Fauci "became more of a champion of some of the authoritarian policies of Democrat governors," said Pence.
"Especially after Joe Biden, as a candidate, said he was essentially going to put Dr. Fauci in charge, it seemed like things changed with him dramatically," Pence said of the doctor.
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