The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Health officials: Trump did not order testing slowdown
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s top health officials testified to Congress on Tuesday that they were never ordered to limit coronavirus testing, despite Trump’s recent rally comment that he told his team to “slow the testing down.”
Members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield and Brett Giroir testified that they were committed to increasing the availability of effective, timely coronavirus testing.
“None of us have ever been told to slow down on testing,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “It’s the opposite. We’re going to be doing more testing, not less.”
Trump said during his rally
Saturday night in Tulsa, Okla., that he had told officials to lower the number of coronavirus tests to curb the rising infection rate in the country — apparently concerned about the optics of the numbers.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people,” Trump said. “You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘slow the testing down, please.’”
Multiple White House officials have since claimed that Trump’s comment was a joke. Asked about it Tuesday morning, Trump said, “I don’t kid.”
“By having more tests, we find more cases,” Trump told reporters. “Therefore, with tests, we’re going to have more cases. By having more cases, it sounds bad. But actually what it is, is
we’re finding people, many of those people aren’t sick or very little.”
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Tuesday he believes Trump was telling the truth in Tulsa, claiming his actions show that he wants to “wish” the virus away.
“Of course, is he undermining testing across the country,” Murphy said. “He has been clear from the very beginning that he does not want to the American public to understand the scope of the epidemic . ... He has been completely transparent that he perceives personal weakness attached to increasing coronavirus numbers.”
The Trump administration is sitting on nearly $14 billion in funding that Congress appropriated for various relevant testing and tracing purposes that has not yet been allocated, dispersed or designated, Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., wrote Sunday in a letter to Alex Azar, the
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary.
The senators said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has yet to award nearly $4 billion in funding that could be used for public health surveillance and contact tracing efforts. Also, very little of the $2 billion Congress set aside to provide free testing for the uninsured has been obligated.
Weeks after Congress appropriated billions in testing money, the Trump administration announced in early May that Connecticut would soon get $100 million to $199 million of the funds. But state officials quickly said they had no idea how much money was on the way or when. State public health officials did not immediately respond to follow questions about that funding Tuesday.
The administration used federal funds to launch 41 testing sites across the country, where the federal government provided supplies and lab contracts.
Murphy said many of those sites have now closed or shifted to state and locally operated testing sites. He called coronavirus Trump’s “best friend.”
Howard Forman, Yale University professor of Public Health, Management and Economics, noted that the number of tests conducted per day was increasing for many weeks earlier in the pandemic leaving him “impressed,” but those numbers have now largely leveled off.
“Over the last six weeks, testing growth has slowed continually,” Forman said.
Giroir, assistant secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said Tuesday the U.S. is now conducting about 500,000 tests a day. Giroir said in May the U.S. will be able to test up to 50 million people a month by September — about 1.6 million tests a day.
As of Monday, the CDC reported that 27 million tests total have been conducted in the U.S. to date with about 2.7 million, or roughly 10 percent, positive. Not all tests are reported to the CDC.