Trump’s Spin on ‘Broken’ Testing
While his administration has faced criticism for being slow to ramp up testing for coronavirus infections, President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the problem was with his predecessors, saying the administration “inherited a broken system” that it “rebuilt.” That’s misleading.
The president has a point that the testing system of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alone couldn’t conduct the kind of wide-scale testing the coronavirus pandemic demanded, as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said.
But several former officials have reiterated Fauci’s comments, explaining that the CDC simply isn’t set up to be a commercial test lab, let alone the only test lab for the country in a pandemic like this. And it was a month after the administration declared a public health emergency that it took steps to allow testing to be conducted more broadly, and then several days more before the private sector announced testing availability.
“The CDC designed a good system.” Fauci said on March 13. “If you want to get the kind of blanket testing and availability that anybody can get it or you could even do surveillance to find out what the penetrance is, you have to embrace the private sector.”
Another problem, which , was a manufacturing issue with the CDC’s test kits, which it
