"The cupboard was bare. The other administration, the last administration, left us nothing," US President Donald Trump told ABC on Tuesday. "We didn't have ventilators. We didn't have medical equipment. The tests were broken — you saw that. We had broken tests. They left us nothing. We've taken it and we've built an incredible stockpile, a stockpile like we've never had before."
However, a report in NBC suggests that Trump was exaggerating somewhat, noting that in June 2016, NPR toured one of the Strategic National Stockpile's warehouses and described the huge amount of supplies housed there, including ventilators, medications, and other medical supplies, estimating that the total value was around $7 billion.
85 million N95 masks were taken from the stockpile during the swine flu crisis in 2009 and not replenished, but officials serving under former President Obama insist that they left things in pretty good shape.
"When we left, there was a pandemic plan, a checklist about what you're supposed to do when," NBC quotes the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under Obama, Lurie Fugate, as saying. "That plan should have been activated that first week in January."