White House defends pace of coronavirus tests despite ‘quality control issues’
The Trump administration pushed back Saturday against criticism that it has been slow to deploy testing for the coronavirus on a nationwide scale.
While health officials from Washington state to Florida have expressed concern over their lack of access to testing kits, administration officials told reporters at the White House that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had met all requests from the two states, where the virus outbreak has been most pronounced.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Stephen Hahn, Commissioner of Food and Drugs at the Food and Drug Administration, said that, despite also receiving a letter from the mayor of New York City pleading for additional tests, that the government had been told by city health officials that their needs had been met.
The availability of testing has been a flashpoint in a growing public health crisis that President Donald Trump has been trying to control with disciplined messaging from a designated coronavirus task force, of which Azar, Hahn, and Vice President Mike Pence are a part.
But on Friday, Trump said that any American who wanted to get a test could “get a test.” Azar and Hahn clarified that any American could request a test of their doctor, who then, in turn, would have access to testing of COVID-19.
Azar did acknowledge that “manufacturing quality control issues” – not the development of the test itself – had slowed their ability to reach a large production capacity.
“There was a delay in this promulgation, and proliferation of the test out from the CDC,” Azar said, “because there was a manufacturing scale-up issue when CDC tried to replicate the test by these other labs.”
“That’s the only issue that happened,” Azar said. “It was never that the test itself was faulty, defective, unavailable.”
There is now an ability to perform 75,000 tests throughout the public health lab system, the officials said, and 1.1 million tests have been shipped to non-public health labs.
An additional 400,000 tests are being prepared for shipment tonight, and 640,000 are awaiting approval for shipment. By Monday, they expect roughly 2.1 million tests to be out in the field for use.
In total, the White House hopes that developers working with public labs will be able to reach 4 million tests by the end of next week – and that does not include private production from groups such as Quest and LabCorp, which are preparing tests of their own.
Shipments thus far have prioritized regions that have experienced clusters of cases: Washington, California and New York, the officials said.
“We’ve prioritized the shipment early on to those states that needed them the most,” Hahn said. Azar added that Washington and California has “everything it wants” in terms of diagnostics.
Hahn said the CDC had tested 3,500 specimens thus far, and that public health labs have tested 1,583 patients.
The CDC test, Azar said, was developed within 14 days from receiving a sequence of COVID-19 from China, amid reports that a recipe for a test had been available in Germany before the United States produced its own.
This story was originally published March 7, 2020 at 4:17 PM.
