Washington: President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr demanded on Friday that President Trump do more to confront the coronavirus infections exploding across the country, calling the federal response “woefully lacking” even as Trump broke a 10-day silence on the pandemic to threaten to withhold a vaccine from New York.

In a blistering statement, Biden said that the recent surge, which is killing more than 1,000 Americans and hospitalising almost 70,000 every day, required a “robust and immediate federal response”.

“I will not be President until next year,” Biden said. “The crisis does not respect dates on the calendar, it is accelerating right now. Urgent action is needed today, now, by the current administration — starting with an acknowledgment of how serious the current situation is.”

Biden released his statement less than an hour before the President appeared in the Rose Garden at the White House, where he announced no new measures to slow the virus’s long-anticipated autumn surge.

Trump hailed the news from Monday that a vaccine under development by Pfizer appeared to be 90 per cent effective.

But he vowed not to order widespread lockdowns as long as he remained in office and threatened to withhold distribution of the vaccine to New York because governor Andrew Cuomo said the state intended to conduct its own review of the vaccine’s approval by the federal government.

It is not clear whether Trump would be able to follow through on that threat before he leaves office. Health care workers, older adults and other vulnerable populations could get access to a vaccine by mid-December, before the January 20 inauguration.

Later on Friday, the President came close to acknowledging Biden’s win before catching himself. “This administration will not be going to a lockdown,” Trump said , adding that “hopefully the — whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be. I guess time will tell”.

A spokesman for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, responded on Twitter, saying that Trump “has failed with his pandemic response, lied to Americans about how bad it was when he knew otherwise & was fired by voters for his incompetence”.

New York Times News Service