President Donald Trump never ordered reductions or slowdowns of testing for coronavirus, said Seema Verma, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), offering her comments on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
At a recent rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump remarked, ““When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’ They test and they test.”
Marlow said of Trump’s remarks, “It seemed just like trash talk to me, but the media certainly took him literally on this. Was anything communicated to your team that there should be less testing done, or is that something that is just more of a media bugaboo?”
Verma replied, “Absolutely not. The president has not given that directive to anybody on his team. I think the point that he was making is that as you do more testing, you’re going to find more cases.”
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“We’re doing more testing than anyone else in the world, so it looks like there’s more going on in the United States,” Verma added, “but the reality is, the president has done an incredible job working with the private sector to stand up a very massive testing system.”
Verma concluded, “I think [Trump] is just making the point that with more testing you’re going to find more cases, but he has never said to anybody we should slow that down.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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