Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar disagrees with a colleague’s claim that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “let the country down.”
Azar appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday and defended the CDC’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and role in the government after White House economic adviser Peter Navarro said the agency disappointed the nation in its testing plan in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press.
“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 told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd.
When the coronavirus outbreak first came to light, the CDC faced criticism over its narrow testing criteria, which missed testing capacity for early cases of the COVID-19 virus. The CDC also faced technical problems in its plan to develop test kits for the coronavirus. The issues created faulty results from test kits initially sent by the CDC to labs in January.
When asked how President Trump feels about the CDC, Navarro deferred the question, saying it’s one that needs to be directly asked to the president.
Azar was later asked on Face the Nation if he takes responsibility for the failures of the CDC earlier this year. He responded by saying there is a public misconception of how the agency is handling the pandemic because the concept is so new.
“We were confronting a situation here that’s completely novel,” he told host Margaret Brennan. “There has never been a national immediate testing regime across public and private sectors. We have had to literally build this from the ground up, Margaret. That’s what most folks don’t quite understand here.”
Azar admitted the CDC had issues scaling up manufacturing of tests to get them to 90 public health labs but said what they attempted was never going to be the backbone of broad mass testing within the country. The secretary was also asked to respond specifically to Navarro’s criticism of the CDC.
“I don’t believe the CDC let this country down,” Azar said. “I believe the CDC serves an important public health role. What was always critical was to get the private sector to the table.”
