A series of missteps at the nation's top public health agency caused a critical shortage of reliable laboratory tests for the coronavirus, hobbling the federal response as the pandemic spread across the country like wildfire, an Associated Press review found.
President Donald Trump assured Americans early this month that the COVID-19 test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is "perfect" and that "anyone who wants a test can get a test."
"You cannot fight a fire blindfolded," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, said at a recent briefing. "We cannot stop this pandemic if we don't know who is infected."
"Basically, they took this as business as usual. ... And that's because the messaging from the White House was 'this is not a big deal, this is no worse than the flu.' So that message basically created no sense of urgency within the FDA or the CDC to fix it."
However, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the CDC's system wasn't designed to test for and track a widespread outbreak, which he characterised as "a failing."
"I don't think they anticipated the technical difficulty, or the speed with which the virus has been moving. The virus was racing out ahead of them."
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