Mistakes the admin has already made in handling the virus.

[playtime]

Here come the attempts to deflect blame for the US not being prepared.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says China not forthcoming initially on coronavirus, setting prevention efforts back
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says China not forthcoming initially on coronavirus, setting prevention efforts back
.................................................................................................................................
The Chinese are absolutely guilty of not being forthcoming about the severity of the outbreak from the very start.

THAT ISN'T THE POINT. Because if the Trump listened to the experts who were saying this was going to be bad they would have taken the inevitable spread here seriously. They would have made sure there were enough test kits, masks, extra hospital beds, etc. THEY DIDN'T. They have been scrambling to respond in an ad hoc manner instead of a proactive, organized way. THEY BLEW IT.

& it was just a matter of time b4 donny blamed obama.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...ort-blame-obama-sluggish-coronavirus-testing/

 

[berg80]

& it was just a matter of time b4 donny blamed obama.

Yup, absolutely predictable. Remember, he does it because the rubes believe the lies.

 

[berg80]

Speaking of rubes believing his lies.

"At a White House Coronavirus Task Force meeting Wednesday, President Donald Trump presented a bold — and completely false — attempt to blame former President Barack Obama for the current lack of testing capacity for coronavirus, which public health officials have said for weeks is leaving them in the dark as to the true nature of the virus’ threat.

“The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing,” Trump said. “And we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more rapid and accurate fashion.”

Later, when someone asked for clarification, Vice President Mike Pence attempted his own version of the claim. “The last administration asserted FDA jurisdiction over testing, and the development of tests like this. And, Bob, the President changed that on Saturday,” Pence said, passing the mic to Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield.

“In the past, we used to be able to have laboratories that could develop what we call ‘Laboratory Developed Tests’ and be able to apply them for clinical purposes. And in the previous administration that became regulated,” the director said.

And on Thursday, yet another administration official — Health Secretary Alex Azar — exerted his own effort trying to back Trump up.

“Since the Obama administration, if you are developing a clinical lab test like this, as CDC did, you need to go FDA and get approval, and emergency use authorization, to send this test out,” Azar said. “What we said on Saturday is that if you are a certified clinical lab able to handle high-complexity tests […] you may develop your own test, and you do not have to wait for us to approve it for you to start using it in patients.”


If something sounds a little funny about blaming the Obama administration for the Trump administration’s testing problems, you’re not alone.

“I was very confused by what President Trump said,” said Rachel Sachs, an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis specializing in intellectual property law, food and drug regulation, and health law.

Redford’s comment, Sachs said, “still made no sense to me.”

The reason it didn’t make sense, Sachs and others say, is that Obama didn’t implement the rules in question. Rather, it’s a George W. Bush-era law that dates back to the anthrax scare of the early aughts, as Missouri School of Law professor Erika Lietzan wrote in the blog Objective Intent.

In short, when the Health secretary declares a public health emergency, laboratories that typically develop their own tests (literally, “Laboratory-Developed Tests” or LDTs) face a higher bar for “emergency use authorization,” or EUAs, than they normally deal with from the FDA."
The Trump Coronavirus Team Keeps Falsely Blaming Obama For Testing Disaster
...................................................................................................................
But............FACTS DON'T MATTER TO TRUMPETTE'S. All that matters is finding a way to excuse his most magnificent infallible Dear Leader for bungling our preparedness.

 

[berg80]

From the beginning, Trump minimized the scale of the crisis, portraying it as a purely foreign threat that could be addressed by closing borders. At a Feb. 26 news conference, he claimed there were 15 cases in America, omitting those diagnosed overseas. “The 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he said. As of this writing, there have been more than 210 cases confirmed across the country and 12 deaths.

Trump dismissed Democratic complaints about his handling of the crisis as “their new hoax.” Last week Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference that the media is paying so much attention to coronavirus “because they think this is what’s going to be what brings down the president.” Speaking to Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, Trump seemed to imply that it was OK for people with coronavirus to go to work: “So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work but they get better.” (He later wrote an angry tweet saying he’d never said sick people should go to work, but he certainly didn’t instruct them to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice and stay home.)

Within the administration, there’s strong pressure not to contradict Trump’s line. In February, when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned that community spread of coronavirus in America was inevitable, the president was reportedly furious, and the director of the C.D.C. said she misspoke. Pro-Trump media figures like Rush Limbaugh suggested that she was part of an anti-Trump conspiracy because her brother is former Justice Department official Rod Rosenstein, often derided on the right as part of the Deep State.

The Times reported that Defense Secretary Mark Esper has warned the military not to make decisions related to Coronavirus that might “run afoul of President Trump’s messaging,” even as leaders have to make quick judgments about protecting troops stationed in countries with outbreaks. A Pentagon spokesperson took issue with the Times story, calling it a “dishonest misrepresentation.” Still, it seems as if in the midst of this burgeoning crisis, we’re seeing a coordinated, whole-of-government campaign to protect the president from being contradicted.

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and author of “The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide,” told me that, reviewing the history of such crises, “One of the huge lessons is: Don’t politicize the communications. You really need credible communicators who people believe.” Trump is the opposite of that. At least half the country distrusts him, and he’s ensured that a good part of the other half distrusts actual experts.

But if this administration is incapable of the basic honesty one expects from officials in a democracy, it also can’t pull off autocratic, top-down coordination. It has utterly failed to ramp up sufficient testing capacity; on Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence admitted, “We don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.”

As I write this, the Grand Princess, a ship carrying thousands of people, is stuck off the coast of San Francisco after a former passenger who had disembarked died of Covid-19, the disease that this coronavirus causes. According to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, 11 passengers and 10 crew members are showing signs of the illness, and Newsom said that number may “significantly understate” the severity of the outbreak onboard. This comes after last month’s disastrous attempt to quarantine people aboard another cruise ship owned by the same company, the Diamond Princess, off the coast of Japan. In the end, 705 people were infected on that boat.

Researchers concluded that if people had been quickly taken off the Diamond Princess, the infection rate would have been only one-eighth as high. Nevertheless, D.H.S. official Ken Cuccinelli told a Senate committee on Thursday that the ship off California can’t be evacuated because American health care facilities lack the capacity to quarantine its passengers. Therefore, at least for now, the Diamond Princess experiment is being run again.

Jeremy Konyndyk, a former director of the foreign disaster assistance program at USAID who helped manage the response to Ebola during Barack Obama’s presidency, said a competent administration would have had a contingency plan for a repeat of the Diamond Princess debacle. “It’s one thing to be the first one to make a mistake,” he told me. “It’s pretty different to be the second one to make the same mistake.” He added, “To say we’ve got no way to bring these people off the cruise ship is extraordinary to me.”

Extraordinary, but perhaps not surprising. “It’s like a Xerox copy of Puerto Rico,” Konyndyk said, comparing the administration’s coronavirus response to its mismanagement of Hurricane Maria’s aftermath. Trump’s presidency has caused manifold catastrophes, but so far, most Americans have not seen them up close. That might be about to change. Trump spent much of Thursday afternoon congratulating himself on Twitter for his coronavirus response. If things get really bad, maybe he’ll toss us a few rolls of paper towels.
Opinion | Trump’s Calamitous Coronavirus Response

 

[berg80]

House Democrats Probe Faulty Test Kits’ Role in Delaying Coronavirus Response
House Democrats Probe Faulty Test Kits’ Role in Delaying Coronavirus Response — ProPublica

I'm thinking the Drumpf admin will once again stonewall a congressional investigation since, like last time, they have a lot to hide.

 

[berg80]

The House Oversight Committee is investigating the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, citing ProPublica’s reporting that problems with the government’s lab tests may have hampered officials’ ability to contain the disease’s spread in the U.S.

“It is essential that accurate and up-to-date information about testing and diagnosed cases is made public — in order to effectively manage this outbreak and keep the trust of the American people,” the Democratic-controlled committee said in a letter sent Tuesday to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, from Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney, Economic and Consumer Policy Subcommittee Chairman Raja Krishnamoorthi, National Security Subcommittee Chairman Stephen F. Lynch and Government Operations Subcommittee Chairman Gerry Connolly. The lawmakers also sent letters requesting documents to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma.

 

[Fang]

It's stunning how misinformed Democrats are or choose to be. You can't even have a rational conversation with these people. Their hate is over the top.

 

[berg80]

It's stunning how misinformed Democrats are or choose to be. You can't even have a rational conversation with these people. Their hate is over the top.

What were you saying?

The White House says it will fail to meet its goal of providing enough coronavirus test kits for 1 million people by the end of the week
The White House says it will fail to meet its goal of providing enough coronavirus test kits for 1 million people by the end of the week

The White House has said the federal government will not be able to keep its promise to deliver enough coronavirus test kits for 1 million people by the end of the week.

Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading the federal government's coronavirus response, made the acknowledgment Thursday while visiting a factory in Minnesota, the BBC reported.

"We don't have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward," he said.

The BBC said that later, speaking in Washington, Pence added: "We still have a ways to go to ensure that tests are available."
................................................................................................................................
Enough tests are not available. Time for the Trump admin to take responsibility for their failure.

 

[Likkmee]

Colombia first Latin American country to run coronavirus tests - government

 

[Fang]

It's stunning how misinformed Democrats are or choose to be. You can't even have a rational conversation with these people. Their hate is over the top.

What were you saying?

The White House says it will fail to meet its goal of providing enough coronavirus test kits for 1 million people by the end of the week
The White House says it will fail to meet its goal of providing enough coronavirus test kits for 1 million people by the end of the week

The White House has said the federal government will not be able to keep its promise to deliver enough coronavirus test kits for 1 million people by the end of the week.

Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading the federal government's coronavirus response, made the acknowledgment Thursday while visiting a factory in Minnesota, the BBC reported.

"We don't have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward," he said.

The BBC said that later, speaking in Washington, Pence added: "We still have a ways to go to ensure that tests are available."
................................................................................................................................
Enough tests are not available. Time for the Trump admin to take responsibility for their failure.

Bullshit. 1.1 million tests this weekend will be delivered. Another 1 million next week. Trump is taking of this much faster than Obama would have.

 

[berg80]

How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.
How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.

On Saturday Jan. 11 — a month and a half before the first Covid-19 case not linked to travel was diagnosed in the United States — Chinese scientists posted the genome of the mysterious new virus, and within a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the disease.

Soon after, researchers in other nations rolled out their own tests, too, sometimes with different genetic targets. By the end of February, the World Health Organization had shipped tests to nearly 60 countries.

The United States was not among them.

Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate health committee, who represents the hard-hit state of Washington, asked in a 3½-page letter on the testing fiasco to Pence, Health Secretary Alex Azar, CDC director Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn.

So far, none has been provided.

“We developed a test very rapidly after China produced the [genetic] sequence. We are in the process of validating that and that’s the test we’re going to be using,” said the CDC’s Stephen Redd, a 30-year veteran of the agency, at a recent briefing, even as members of the presidential task force acknowledged that the pace of testing had lagged.

Azar, who initially led the White House response and has now been sidelined by Pence, also has kept defending the testing regime.

“We’ve actually been progressing with this on par with our peer countries,” he told reporters recently.

The government’s incapacity to conduct widespread testing slowed diagnoses, creating chains of infection. It also deprived epidemiologists of a map that could have told them how far and how fast the virus was traveling and where they should concentrate efforts to slow it down.

But there were additional problems with the administration’s approach to testing, according to experts and former officials. From the start, the White House focused on containment, trusting that a limited ban on travel to and from China could somehow force a fast-moving virus to stop cold when it hit the Chinese border. But, while containment might have helped buy the U.S. some time, without aggressive domestic surveillance through testing, it was an incomplete strategy.
..............................................................................................................
This epic failure explains why the Trump admin recently lied when it blamed the Obama admin for its own failures.

 

[berg80]

& it was just a matter of time b4 donny blamed obama.

Now we know why.

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted on Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

But once the CDC finally began its national testing regime, it faltered in almost every way imaginable.

The initial tests didn’t work, and officials are probing whether there was possible contamination. The protocol for who could be tested was restricted to people already known to have been exposed to the virus or who had been in China, even as the epidemic raced to multiple countries like Japan, South Korea, Italy and Iran.

Decisions about testing are usually made by scientists, but Democrats have accused the White House of putting politics above expertise — and lacking a coherent response.

“We are staring down a potential pandemic,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently. “We have a crisis of coronavirus, and President Trump has no plan, no urgency, no understanding of the facts or how to coordinate a response.”

 

[22lcidw]

& it was just a matter of time b4 donny blamed obama.

Now we know why.

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted on Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

But once the CDC finally began its national testing regime, it faltered in almost every way imaginable.

The initial tests didn’t work, and officials are probing whether there was possible contamination. The protocol for who could be tested was restricted to people already known to have been exposed to the virus or who had been in China, even as the epidemic raced to multiple countries like Japan, South Korea, Italy and Iran.

Decisions about testing are usually made by scientists, but Democrats have accused the White House of putting politics above expertise — and lacking a coherent response.

“We are staring down a potential pandemic,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently. “We have a crisis of coronavirus, and President Trump has no plan, no urgency, no understanding of the facts or how to coordinate a response.”

The disease is out. There are people infected who do not know. There are people who are infected or will be infected who will purposely spread it. Getting their vengeance and vendetta towards others. Times like this is when the power structures balls are exposed for a good kicking. If we see terrorists in any form do what they do in violence, why would they not do this? Our nation is ripe for this.

 

[berg80]

Here's Big Fat Don explaining he doesn't want people on a quarantined cruise ship let off because of the optics, for him, of more confirmed cases of virus infection.

 

[miketx]

Shutting down departments of the government, and firing or reassigning personnel from those departments, which were established to handle a health crisis like the one we are now experiencing.
Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response
Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response

Overruling the CDC in bringing back infected Americans from a cruise ship on a commercial flight. Allowing those infected people to expose non-infected people on the flight to the virus.
Coronavirus-infected Americans flown home against CDC’s advice
https://www.washingtonpost.com/heal...f54cae-5279-11ea-b119-4faabac6674f_story.html

Employees of HHS were told to deal with potentially infected Americans returning from China without the necessary training or equipment. Those employees then returned to their daily lives without being tested for the virus. The first case of a person contracting the virus from an unknown source happened within twenty miles of where the people returning from China were being housed. Making it likely the first case of infection directly related to the admin's incompetence.
HHS whistleblower claims US workers received coronavirus evacuees without proper precautions
HHS whistleblower: US workers received coronavirus evacuees without training or protection - CNNPolitics

Downplaying the threat to the public's health. “And again, when you have 15 people — and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero — that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” he said.

Allowing a political message instead of a science based message be the admin's priority.

Contradicting health experts in the admin's public messaging.
President Trump contradicts health officials on coronavirus response

Not making sure enough test kits are available.
New York Is Making Its Own Coronavirus Test After The CDC’s Tests Have Repeatedly Failed

Not making sure enough protective equipment like the appropriate masks are available.
The Global Shortage of Medical Masks Won't Be Easing Soon

Not making a plan for the increased availability of hospital beds when existing facilities become overwhelmed.
........................................................................................................................
Two inevitable events are about to unfold. One is the spread of the virus. Incompetence by the admin has already resulted in it spreading faster than it would have if health safety protocols had been followed.

The other is there is going to be a massive effort on the part of the admin and the right wing media cohort lead by Faux, to misinform the public (as it always does) about the admin's already bungled response to this very real threat to the public's safety. We have already witnessed sock puppet Mike Pence heap unwarranted praise on Dear Leader for preparing the nation for an outbreak. That message will be endlessly repeated. It is a bald faced lie.

Hilarious how these idiots are all virus experts now.

 

[berg80]

‘Maybe I have a natural ability’: Trump plays medical expert on coronavirus by second-guessing the professionals
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...e0574c-5ffb-11ea-9055-5fa12981bbbf_story.html

President Trump likes to say that he fell into politics almost by accident, and on Friday, as he sought to calm a nation gripped with fears over coronavirus, he suggested he would have thrived in another profession — medical expert.

“I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump boasted to reporters during a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he met with actual doctors and scientists who are feverishly scrambling to contain and combat the deadly illness. Citing a “great, super-genius uncle” who taught at MIT, Trump professed that it must run in the family genes.

“People are really surprised I understand this stuff,” he said. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

But for members of the general public alarmed by more than 300 diagnosed cases in the United States — including at least 21 that his administration announced Friday were discovered on a cruise ship off the San Francisco coast — Trump’s performance during an impromptu 45-minute news conference at CDC was not necessarily reassuring.

Sporting his trademark red 2020 campaign hat with the slogan “Keep America Great,” the president repeatedly second-guessed and waved off the actual medical professionals standing next to him. He attacked his Democratic rivals — including calling Washington Gov. Jay Inslee a “snake” for criticizing his response — and chided a CNN reporter for smiling and called her network “fake news.”

And he described coronavirus testing kits — which his administration has been criticized for being slow to distribute — as “beautiful” and said they were as “perfect” as his Ukraine phone call last summer that led him to be impeached.


Mapping the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. and worldwide

The upshot was that the self-proclaimed medical savant came off looking less interested in his administration’s unsteady efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus than he was in bolstering his own status in a campaign year. Trump repeatedly sought to judge his administration’s performance by the numbers of how many have been shown to have contracted the virus and comparing it to other nations — and, in doing so, appeared to be making judgments based solely on that scorecard.

 

[berg80]

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthe...27105ca718a5143a4b4/optimized/full.pdf#page=1

 

[berg80]

Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing
Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing

It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?

This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.

But the number of tests performed across the country has fallen far short of those projections, despite extraordinarily high demand, The Atlantic has found.

Read: You’re likely to get the coronavirus

“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”

Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.
..............................................................................................................................
This is the biggest response failure by the US government to a crisis since..........since...........Trump's failure to respond adequately to Hurricane Maria.

 

[kyzr]

How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.
How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.

On Saturday Jan. 11 — a month and a half before the first Covid-19 case not linked to travel was diagnosed in the United States — Chinese scientists posted the genome of the mysterious new virus, and within a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the disease.

Soon after, researchers in other nations rolled out their own tests, too, sometimes with different genetic targets. By the end of February, the World Health Organization had shipped tests to nearly 60 countries.

The United States was not among them.

Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate health committee, who represents the hard-hit state of Washington, asked in a 3½-page letter on the testing fiasco to Pence, Health Secretary Alex Azar, CDC director Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn.

So far, none has been provided.

“We developed a test very rapidly after China produced the [genetic] sequence. We are in the process of validating that and that’s the test we’re going to be using,” said the CDC’s Stephen Redd, a 30-year veteran of the agency, at a recent briefing, even as members of the presidential task force acknowledged that the pace of testing had lagged.

Azar, who initially led the White House response and has now been sidelined by Pence, also has kept defending the testing regime.

“We’ve actually been progressing with this on par with our peer countries,” he told reporters recently.

The government’s incapacity to conduct widespread testing slowed diagnoses, creating chains of infection. It also deprived epidemiologists of a map that could have told them how far and how fast the virus was traveling and where they should concentrate efforts to slow it down.

But there were additional problems with the administration’s approach to testing, according to experts and former officials. From the start, the White House focused on containment, trusting that a limited ban on travel to and from China could somehow force a fast-moving virus to stop cold when it hit the Chinese border. But, while containment might have helped buy the U.S. some time, without aggressive domestic surveillance through testing, it was an incomplete strategy.
..............................................................................................................
This epic failure explains why the Trump admin recently lied when it blamed the Obama admin for its own failures.

What testing failure? What virus is sweeping across the US? Stop lying.
The tests are available, the US is doing better than any other country managing the spread of COVID-19.
The COVID-19 outbreak is being successfully managed by the Trump admin, and your whining can't disprove that. Just look at the global infection rate and see that the US is doing much better than the rest of the world based on population.
The US infections are roughly the same as Switzerland. Stop whining, save it for the fall.
Coronavirus: Which countries have confirmed cases?
United States - 213 cases, 17 deaths
Switzerland - 210 cases, 1 death
Germany - 684
France - 716 cases, 11 deaths
Japan - 705 cases, 6 deaths
Italy - 4,636 cases, 197 deaths
Iran - 5,823 cases, 145 deaths
South Korea - 7,041 cases, 44 deaths
China - 80,651 cases, 3,070 deaths

Combining the EU cases to be roughly the equivalent population to the US shows just how great a job Trump is doing:
EU 6,246 cases, 209 deaths
US 213 cases, 17 deaths

 

[berg80]

Squandered time: How the Trump administration lost control of the coronavirus crisis
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...47d3d0-5fcb-11ea-9055-5fa12981bbbf_story.html

The coronavirus had already begun to spiral out of control when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, during routine Senate testimony, made a surprising claim.

“As of today, I can announce that the CDC has begun working with health departments in five cities to use its flu surveillance network to begin testing individuals with flu-like symptoms for the Chinese coronavirus,” Azar said. “This effort will help see whether there is broader spread than we have been able to detect so far.”

But there were two major problems: The cities weren’t ready, and the tests didn’t work.

In fact, when Azar’s team had sent his prepared remarks to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before delivery, the agency pushed back and urged him to soften his language. State health departments had not yet been informed of the plans — and were certain to be upset by them — and the coronavirus test kits contained a faulty component that caused a spike in inconclusive results. Azar announced the plans anyway, in part because “it would be really valuable for him [to] have the news,” as one HHS official put it in an internal email.