Pelosi: Trump administration first said they rejected WHO tests
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that the Trump administration said in the beginning they rejected the World Health Organization (WHO) tests for the coronavirus.
She was speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday.
According to an unofficial transcript of the interview NBCUniversal, the owners of CNBC, sent to US and Global News, Pelosi said, “Well, I’m not pleased. But you have to know even in the face of this pandemic earlier this see, the administration cut — made very serious cuts to the CDC. Even in light of this happening. And so, they have not — they said in the beginning they rejected the World Health Organization tests, they said they were going to make their own. They made their own, they didn’t work. It set us back a few weeks. The outreach that they should have been doing out there curtailed because of the cuts that the administration made, already knowing that the pandemic was here.”
Former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed on March 15 that WHO offered testing kits to the US but “we refused them.” According to Factcheck.org, a Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, the US never “refused” a test from WHO.
The Factcheck.org article by Jessica McDonald points out that when during a press conference on March 17 a reporter asked Trump about Biden’s claim, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx discussed the significance of quality control and alluded to potential test defects and Adm. Brett Giroir refuted the idea the US refused the WHO tests.
The article also quotes the executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme as saying on March 19, “WHO developed the tests mainly to support countries with weaker health systems.” After mentioning the WHO official noted the US had a “fabulous” scientific system and “a wonderful capacity” to develop tests, Factcheck.org continues, quoting him as saying, “So no, we did not offer the tests to the U.S., which would be standard practice.”
The official did add, “If we were asked, obviously, we would have responded.”
According to Politico, Senator Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate health committee, had asked in a 3½-page letter on the testing failure to Vice President Mike Pence, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, CDC director Robert Redfield and Health Secretary Alex Azar, “Please provide an explanation for why the Covid-19 diagnostic test approved by the World Health Organization was not used.”
CDC’s 30-year veteran, Stephen Redd, said at a briefing, “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.”
“The initial tests didn’t work, and officials are probing whether there was possible contamination,” says the March 6 Politico article.
The Factcheck.org article says that WHO told them countries “did not have to pay” for the tests it distributed, which were produced by a manufacturer in Germany.
The article goes on to state that Rangarajan Sampath, the chief scientific officer of the nonprofit Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, told Factcheck.org that the WHO tests are typically intended for low- and middle-income countries that lack the ability to test.
“In part, this is because any assay, or test, the WHO might choose to produce could be easily manufactured in the U.S. or European Union, Sampath said, so the agency doesn’t usually supply kits to those countries,” writes McDonald.
“Still, he said, any nation — even wealthy ones — can request a test kit from the WHO. ‘They don’t restrict them to low- and middle-income countries,’ he said.”
