Biden says GSA refusal to share information on coronavirus could hurt his administration’s effort to fight it

While speaking virtually to frontline workers on Wednesday, President-elect Joe Biden said that the Government Services Administration's lack of cooperation around the presidential transition could put his team's effort to fight the pandemic behind by “weeks or months.”

Video transcript

JOE BIDEN: I am optimistic, but we should be further along. One of the problems that we're having now is the failure of the administration to recognize-- the law says that the General Services Administration has a person who recognizes who the winner is, and then they have to have access to all the data and information that the government possesses to be prepared.

And it doesn't require there to be an absolute winner. It says the apparent winner. The apparent winner. And we've been unable to get access to the kinds of things we need to know about, the depth of the stockpiles. We know there's not much at all.

We get to the point where we have a sense of when these vaccines comes out, how they'll be distributed, who will be first in line, what the plan is. There are over 300 million Americans and beyond our border that are gonna have to be taken care of.

And there's a whole lot of things that we just don't have available to us, which unless it's made available soon, we're gonna be behind by weeks or months being able to put together the whole initiative relating to the biggest promise we have with two drug companies coming along and finding 95% effectiveness efficiency in the vaccines, which is enormous promise. So I just want to tell you that that's the only slowdown right now that we have.