Fauci: No orders to slow virus testing
Testimony contradicts Trump’s claim at rally
WASHINGTON – Dr. Anthony Fauci told House lawmakers on Tuesday that despite President Donald Trump’s claim that he had asked officials to “slow the testing down,” he had never been given such a directive.
“To my knowledge, none of us have ever been told to slow down on testing. That just is a fact,” he said. Fauci said testing and contact surveillance were fundamental to “understand exactly what’s going on in community spread.”
“So, it’s the opposite. We’re going to be doing more testing, not less,” said Fauci, the top infectious-disease expert at the National Institutes of Health.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing came amid continued scrutiny over Trump’s handling of the virus and nationwide protests over racism and police brutality, which sent hundreds of thousands marching into streets amid the pandemic. Fauci was joined by Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention; Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; and Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health for Health and Human Services, and answered questions for nearly six hours about the virus and offered an update on how the nation is weathering the pandemic.
Trump has received fresh criticism after holding a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last week – something that concerned some health experts – and for telling the crowd he asked for a slow down on testing.
“Here’s the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” Trump said. “So I said to
my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’ ”
Some of Trump’s advisers said the president intended the remark in jest. But when asked earlier Tuesday whether he had been joking about a reduction in testing, Trump said, “I don’t kid.”
Like Fauci, Redfield, Hahn and Giroir each told lawmakers they had never heard any request from the White House to slow down testing.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told USA TODAY earlier Tuesday that the administration had “absolutely not” moved to curtail COVID-19 testing. He said Giroir reports to the NIH every morning about the number of tests that have been conducted.
“I think it’s now 23 million and it goes up every day. And we’re all totally motivated to see it go up even faster,” Collins said.
The coronavirus has infected 2.3 million Americans and killed more than 120,000.
States are ramping up reopening efforts following lockdown measures meant to slow the spread of the virus. A growing number of those states have seen spikes in the number of cases – such as Florida, which recently reported a record number of daily cases.
Trump again blamed increased testing for the spike in a tweet Tuesday morning.
“Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding,” he said. “With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!”
But Fauci told the committee that in states where there is an increase in the percentage of people testing positive, it is a clear “indication that there are additional infections that are responsible for those increases.”
Fauci said the “disturbing surge of infections” was due to a combination of factors, including an increase in person-to-person transmission, or community spread.
“That’s something that I’m really quite concerned about,” Fauci said. “The way you address that – and I’ve said this over and over again – is you have to have the manpower, the system, the testing, to identify, isolate and contact trace in an effective way, so that when you see those increases, you can understand where they’re coming from.”
He advised Florida and other states that are seeing a spike in cases to adhere to the “carefully thought out” CDC guidelines for phased reopenings, “to stay within the framework of the particular phase of reopening you’re in, and to not throw caution to the wind.”
In addition to concern about community spread that might result from Trump’s rally in Tulsa, and another event that was planned for Tuesday in Arizona, there is fear that the massive protests against police brutality and discrimination that erupted around the nation in recent weeks could trigger a spike in cases.
Fauci raised eyebrows during the hearing after being questioned about the end of a grant at the National Institutes of Health that was being used to help researchers examine coronaviruses and the transmission of diseases from bats to humans.
Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Texas, asked why it was canceled in the middle of a pandemic when such research could have been vital, to which Fauci said he did not know the rationale behind the sudden halt of the program.
“I don’t know the reason but we were told to cancel it,” Fauci said.
Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., asked Fauci why the coronavirus has taken a greater toll on the African American community.
“There are two elements that make it much more difficult for them and why they’re suffering disproportionately,” Fauci replied. One, African Americans are more likely to be employed in occupations that don’t allow them to work remotely. And two, underlying medical conditions that make death or serious consequences from COVID-19 more likely “are clearly disproportionately more expressed in the African American population than in the rest of the population.”
Rush asked whether Fauci thought racism was to blame.
“Obviously, the African American community has suffered from racism for a very, very long period of time. And I cannot imagine that that has not contributed to the conditions that they find themselves in economically and otherwise,” Fauci said. “So, the answer, congressman, is yes.”