‘CDC let the country down’
Agency’s blunders cost us dearly in virus fight, says White House
The White House has rebuked the top US health agency, saying “it let the country down” on providing testing crucial to the battle against the coronavirus outbreak.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been under scrutiny since producing a faulty test for Covid-19 that caused weeks of delays in the US response.
Critics have pointed out that it could simply have accepted kits made by the World Health Organisation, which has been producing them since late January, instead of insisting on developing its own test.
“Early on in this crisis, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
“Not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. That did set us back.”
The Food and Drug Administration has also criticised the CDC for not following its own protocols in manufacturing Covid-19 tests. The errors were not corrected until late February.
Trump often blames the administration of his predecessor Barack Obama for passing on “broken tests” for the coronavirus – although Obama left office years before the virus came into existence.
Navarro’s comments marked the strongest criticism by a named
White House official of the CDC’s role in the slow rollout of testing.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar defended the CDC against Navarro’s criticism, telling CBS it was never meant to be “the backbone of testing, of broad, mass testing, in the United States”.
“I don’t believe the CDC let this country down. I believe the CDC serves an important public health role. And what was always critical was to get the private sector to the table,” Azar said on Face the Nation.
The United States has the world’s largest coronavirus outbreak by far, with over 89,000 deaths among nearly 1.5 million cases, according to Johns Hopkins University.
In New York, the hardest-hit part of the US, Governor Andrew Cuomo took a virus test on live television on Sunday to encourage more widespread testing and pave the way for a safer reopening of the populous state.