The White House rebuked the top US health agency on Sunday, saying “it let the country down” on providing testing crucial to the battle against the coronavirus outbreak.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been under intense scrutiny since producing a faulty test for COVID-19 that caused weeks of delays in the US response.
Critics have pointed out that it could simply have accepted kits made by the World Health Organization, which has been producing them since late January, instead of insisting on developing its own test.
“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,” White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back.”
The Food and Drug Administration has also criticized the CDC for not following its own protocols in manufacturing COVID-19 tests. The errors were not corrected until late February.
Trump often blames the administration of his predecessor, Barack Obama, for passing on “broken tests” for the new coronavirus — although Obama left office years before the virus came into existence.
But Navarro’s comments mark the strongest criticism by a named White House official of the CDC’s role in the administration’s slow rollout of testing.