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The U.S. has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world which explains why President Donald Trump’s response to the crisis is always under scrutiny. But his recent statement is a bit perplexing since he appears to be blaming his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, for leaving behind “broken tests” for the coronavirus.
During a meeting between Donald Trump and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a reporter asked the President if voters consider his handling of the coronavirus pandemic as a factor when they cast their votes. “Is it fair for the voters to take into consideration your handling of the pandemic when they assess whether to reelect you in the fall?” CNN Reporter Jim Acosta asked Trump.
Donald Trump responded by blaming former President Barack Obama’s administration. “The last administration left us nothing. We started off with bad, broken tests, and obsolete tests,” Trump said, according to HuffPost.
But the response perplexed the CNN reporter as Barack Obama left the Oval Office in 2017, two years before the novel coronavirus was detected in Wuhan in 2019. “You say ‘broken tests’ — it’s a new virus, so how could the tests be broken?” Acosta questioned Trump.
“We had broken tests,” Trump continued on but he never really answered Acosta’s question, according to Vox. “We had tests that were obsolete. We had tests that didn’t take care of people.”
Trump then criticized how former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden handled the 2009 swine flu or H1N1 epidemic. “If you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this, they didn’t do testing like this, and they lost approximately 14,000 people,” Trump said, according to CNBC. “They started thinking about testing when it was far too late.”
However, his statement was refuted by Ron Klain, a former Obama administration official who managed the Ebola outbreak in 2014. “The Obama administration tested 1 million people for H1N1 in the first month after the first US diagnosed case,” he tweeted.
Klain then compared the Obama administration’s response to the H1N1 with Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic nothing that the current administration lagged behind in terms of testing. “The first US coronavirus case was 50+ days ago,” he added. “And we haven’t even tested 10,000 people yet.”
