House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) said that a combination of arrogance, hubris, and mismanagement is why the US lacks adequate coronavirus testing.
Schiff said on MSNBC’s AM Joy:
It looks like an excess of hubris and arrogance that the W.H.O. Couldn’t possibly produce as good or as reliable test we could do on ourselves. I think it shows the lack of appreciation for just how bad this could get and how quickly that we would reject the use of those tests. And these are precisely the kind of issues frankly that we want the commission to examine, that is why didn’t we have the testing capacity immediately ramped up the way other countries did, we’re supposed to be the most scientific and technologically advanced nation in the world.
So why even today are we so far behind in testing? Is it still such a mystery to us all over the country just how many Americans are infected? We really have little or no idea. And it is because of this lack of testing. And frankly the inability to roll up the tests that the states and the early CDC tests prevented us from using a containment strategy, we had to move to mitigation because the virus was already loose in the United States and we didn’t know so I only have a partial picture of what went wrong in terms of the early testing problem, a lot of mismanagement within the Trump administration. But we need to get the answers to be prepared for the next round when this comes back and even now, to be able to identify just how widespread it is.
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Video:
Adam Schiff discusses how Trump's arrogance and mismanagement of coronavirus testing have cost Americans their lives. pic.twitter.com/qgss45qhkR
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) April 12, 2020
Americans are dead because Trump arrogantly refused to use the WHO test and then he has continually mismanaged the entire testing process. Trump is spending Easter trying to blame Democrats and Congress for the spread of the coronavirus, but the reality is that the virus was a health crisis that could have been managed with good public policy.
It didn’t have to happen this way, and the reason why it did is named Donald Trump.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
