Yang in new book: Trump might have won in 2020 ‘if not for the coronavirus’

Andrew Yang, most recently a former New York City mayoral candidate, says in his new book that former President Trump could have won in 2020 “if not for the coronavirus, which had killed 230,000 Americans by the time of the election,” Newsweek reported.

Yang, who also ran as a Democratic presidential candidate in the 2020 election, wrote in his new book, “Forward,” that it was “​hard to imagine a president doing a worse job than Trump of leading the country through the crisis,” blasting the president for how the United States managed the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Hill has reached out to a spokesperson for Trump for comment.

Yang also assigned some of the blame for how the country handled the COVID-19 pandemic to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, writing in his book that the agency fell “on its face,” according to Newsweek.

He criticized the fact that in the early days of the pandemic, the country lacked sufficient contract-tracing measures and at times grappled with determining which people on flights needed to quarantine.

He also blamed a lack of personal protective equipment, contaminated COVID-19 test kits and an insufficient understanding of how the coronavirus traveled between countries as further miring the country’s initial response to the pandemic.

“For thousands of Americans, it was literally death by bureaucracy,” Yang said in his book, according to Newsweek. “Our bureaucracies are too often embarrassingly or tragically ineffective and inefficient, and generally no one is held accountable when they fail.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a health care crisis that has affected both the Trump and Biden administrations, both of whom have received criticism at various points for how the government had handled the pandemic. 

President Biden’s administration earlier this summer received heat for trying to push for COVID-19 booster shots after two senior scientists in the vaccine division of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) left.

White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said in late August following the departure of the two scientists that the FDA was “gold standard.” 

“That decision was made by and announced by the nation’s leading public health officials,” Zients said in defense of an announcement then made by the administration to roll out boosters nationwide to most Americans starting Sept. 20.