“That is simply inexcusable at this time of the pandemic,” Mulvaney said.
The Mulvaney anecdote comes when the Trump administration, and especially President Donald Trump, have touted the country’s increasing testing capacity since the first serious steps in test operations.
In an interview Friday with José Díaz-Balart of Telemundo, the president declared that “our tests are far superior to anyone’s,” and just a few days earlier, he had proclaimed that “the United States is by far number one in tests “in the world.
And the White House initially tried to rule out a further increase in cases across the south and west in the past month by attributing the new crush of cases to increased availability of evidence. But local leaders in the areas where the new outbreaks are emerging have voiced concern about the need for better testing, and the White House was forced to reverse the course in a plan to reduce federal support for test sites in Texas. .
On Sunday, the administration’s test czar, Admiral Brett Giroir, acknowledged that commercial labs, which he said conducted half of the nation’s tests other than point-of-care tests, were experiencing delays in the results of tests.
“We need to decrease the time to change those results, and we have a number of efforts,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
At a press conference Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany brushed aside Mulvaney’s concerns, noting that the United States had conducted more than 40 million tests so far and claiming that “we lead the world in testing, “while emphasizing that testing capacity has improved significantly since the pandemic first erupted in the spring.
“So, leading the world in testing, I would say that means we are doing a pretty good job,” said McEnany.
Mulvaney’s editorial, who now serves as the administration’s special envoy for Northern Ireland, focused on his suggestions for lawmakers as Congress works to pass a fourth stimulus package later this month.
“Any stimulus must be directed at the root cause of our recession: dealing with Covid,” he wrote, focusing on research money, temporary hospital beds or therapy rather than fiscal stimulus, including travel incentives, although tens of millions of Americans remain. out of work.
