White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention let the American people down during the coronavirus pandemic.
“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. Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back,” Navarro said Sunday on Meet the Press, adding, “The fact of the matter is, and what President Trump realized early on is that if you lock people down, you may save lives directly from the China virus. But you indirectly, you’re gonna kill a lot more people.”
Navarro was repeating a theory pushed by President Trump and other critics of strict lockdown measures in response to the coronavirus that the “cure” to the pandemic should not be “worse” than the virus itself.
Early on during the pandemic, Trump said he would not be surprised to see a national uptick in suicides as a result of the economic toll of the pandemic.
“You’re going to have suicides by the thousands,” Trump said in late March. “People get tremendous anxiety and depression, and you have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies. You have death. Probably and — I mean, definitely — would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about with regard to the virus.”
Democrats have said statewide lockdown measures cannot be completely lifted until a federal testing strategy has been rolled out and more test kits are made available for widespread use.
