The nation’s top infectious disease doctor said that neither President Trump nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are to blame for the slow rollout of COVID-19 testing in the United States.
Appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that there was a series of “multiple things” that went wrong, including a “technical glitch.”
“It was a complicated series of multiple things that conflated that just, you know, went the wrong way,” Fauci said. “One of them was a technical glitch that slowed things down in the beginning. Nobody’s fault. There wasn’t any bad guys there. It just happened.”
Addressing the technical glitch, Hewitt asked the doctor if “every president have run into the same problem?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Fauci replied. “This has nothing to do with anybody’s fault, certainly not the president’s fault.”
Trump has previously pushed back on the notion that he is to blame for the testing shortage. After a speech where he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, the president said the issues were not his fault.
“No, I don’t take responsibility at all because we were given a set of circumstances and we were given rules, regulations, and specifications from a different time. It wasn’t meant for this kind of an event,” Trump said during a Rose Garden speech last week.
In the U.S., there have been 5,894 cases of the coronavirus, 17 recoveries, and 97 deaths, according to the latest reading by the Johns Hopkins University tracker. Although other tallies had the total of confirmed deaths passing 100 as of Tuesday afternoon.
