President Donald Trump blatantly broke with Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday, claiming he doesn’t “agree” with the health expert’s assessment that the U.S. needs to greatly expand its coronavirus testing capacities.
Speaking at his daily COVID-19 briefing at the White House, Trump dubiously maintained the U.S. has “tested far more than anyone else anywhere in the world” when asked about Fauci’s assertion in a just-published interview that testing actually needs to be “significantly” ramped up.
Pressed to respond directly to Fauci’s remarks, Trump added, “I don’t agree with him, if he said that.”
Fauci, a senior member of Trump’s coronavirus task force and the nation’s top infectious disease expert, did not attend the Thursday briefing.
Trump has experienced a rocky relationship with Fauci since he joined the White House coronavirus task force. Earlier this month, Trump even retweeted a post calling for the doctor’s firing.
The president’s insistence that the U.S. has performed “far more” tests than other countries is misleading.
While it has carried the largest number of tests, the U.S. lags behind several other countries on a per capita basis, including Germany and South Korea.
Considering the U.S. has more than 300 million residents, the per capita figure carries far greater importance than the individual number of tests, according to health experts.
The White House COVID-19 task force said the U.S. had performed roughly 5 million tests as of Thursday evening — accounting for less than 2% of the total population.
In an interview with TIME Magazine published Thursday, Fauci addressed the country’s testing disparities and said far more needs to be done.
“We need to significantly ramp up not only the number of tests, but the capacity to perform them, so that you don’t have a situation where you have a test but it can’t be done because there isn’t a swab, or because there isn’t extraction media, or not the right vial,” Fauci said.
“I am not overly confident right now at all that we have what it takes to do that. We are doing better, and I think we are going to get there, but we are not there yet.”
Fauci and other medical experts say the U.S. needs to perform at least 4 million tests every week before the nation’s economy can be safely reopened. At the moment, the U.S. only performs about 1 million tests per week.
Nonetheless, Trump kept claiming the U.S. is outdoing itself during Thursday’s briefing, as the nation’s coronavirus death toll neared 50,000.
“As you know, we are very advanced on testing,” the president said. “Other countries are calling us to find out what we are doing.”
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