Yahoo obtains some COVIS information Biden says the White House won't provide

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden blasted the Trump administration Wednesday for refusing to share information needed to help his incoming team battle the coronavirus pandemic, including data on supplies in the national stockpile.

“We’ve been unable to get access to the kinds of things we need to know about the depths of the stockpiles,” he said during a roundtable with frontline health workers. “We know there’s not much at all.”

A copy of those stockpile numbers — dated Nov. 16 — was provided to Yahoo News, which is publishing them. The numbers appear to show progress in some areas, such as in the stockpile of N95 respirators and ventilators, but also makes clear that earlier Trump administration promises to bolster the stockpile have fallen short.

President Trump has frequently blamed the Obama administration for not leaving a sufficient supply of equipment in the National Strategic Stockpile, even falsely claiming the country was left with no ventilators.

“The cupboard was bare,” Trump told ABC News in the spring. “The other administration, the last administration, left us nothing.”

There were actually 16,600 ventilators in the stockpile when the pandemic started.

Biden’s remarks on Wednesday, however, could also be seen as not totally accurate, though he was not specific about what areas he regarded as low. There are now, for example, almost 153,000 ventilators in the stockpile, according the report obtained by Yahoo News, or almost 10 times the amount at the beginning of the pandemic.

There are also now in the stockpile about 135 million N95 masks — an item that has been in short supply since the beginning of the pandemic. The Trump administration had previously promised there would be 300 million N95s in the stockpile by the fall. ...