On Monday, President Trump tried to redirect blame for his coronavirus response to the Obama administration.
A White House journalist asked Trump, who repeatedly claimed that increased evidence led to an increase in COVID-19 cases in the U.S. of 3.3 million.
“We have one of the lowest death rates,” the president said before moving on to an attack on Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the alleged 2020 Democratic candidate.
“Biden and Obama stopped their tests,” said Trump. “They just stopped him. You probably know that. I’m sure you don’t want to report it. But they stopped trying. Right in the middle, they just said, ‘No more tests.’ “
It is not entirely clear what Trump was referring to, the Obama-era testing program. He previously criticized the Obama administration for its handling of the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, which killed about 12,500 Americans. (On Monday, he acknowledged that the so-called swine flu was “a much smaller problem than we have.”)
But it is not the first time that Trump has tried to blame Obama and Biden for their faltering response to the coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, almost three years after they left office.
At a coronavirus task force briefing in early March, Trump also invoked his predecessor.
“The Obama administration made a decision on the tests that turned out to be very damaging to what we are doing,” Trump said. “And we reversed that decision a few days ago so that the tests can be carried out in a much more accurate and faster way.”
According to FactCheck.org from the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, such a rule or regulation was never implemented under the previous administration.
“The Obama administration attempted to impose a risk-based regulatory system on laboratory-developed tests, or LDT, and introduced a draft guidance in 2014,” said FactCheck.org. But that guide was never finalized, and was withdrawn after Trump won the 2016 election.
“There is no formal document that Trump should terminate to allow laboratories to create their own tests for coronavirus,” he added.
In late March, Trump claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “inherited a broken test.”
“When CDC first saw their test, the biggest problem they had was that the test didn’t work,” he said. “That was not ours. That has been there for a long time. Now we have the best tests in the world. “
Politifact’s “Truth-o-Meter” gave the claim a “Pants on Fire” rating.
When the US government began shipping test kits on February 5, the fact-checking site noted that “there was no legacy test because a test could not be created until the new virus emerged.”
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