HHS Sec. Azar Says ‘I Don’t Believe the CDC Let This Country Down’ After WH Advisor Navarro Says They Did

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar disputed a charge leveled by White House trade advisor Peter Navarro that the CDC let the country down in its early response to the coronavirus.

Navarro appeared on Meet the Press and, when asked if President Donald Trump still has confidence in the CDC, said the following (video here):

“Early on in this crisis, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing. Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back.”

Subsequently, Azar appeared on Face the Nation, where Margaret Brennan confronted him about the U.S. coronavirus response, serious questions about reopening, and the CDC specifically.

“The CDC has been blamed for failure and mistakes with testing. Do you take responsibility for that?” Brennan asked.

“We were confronting a situation here that’s completely novel. There has never been a national, immediate testing regime across public and private sectors. We have had to literally build this from the ground up,” Azar said. That’s what some folks don’t quite understand here, is that the CDC’s role is to develop an initial, fairly low throughput public health test that health labs will do for initial diagnosis. But then we count on the private sector actually to scale up these high throughput, large test capacities.”

“So you don’t take responsibility for any problems that the CDC has admitted to having had?” Brennan followed up.

Azar said the CDC had “an issue as they scaled up manufacturing of tests to get them out to about 90 public health labs,” before saying “that was never going to be the backbone of testing, of broad mass testing in the United States.”

Brennan specifically pointed to what Navarro said and Azar responded, “I don’t believe the CDC let this country down. I believe the CDC serves an important public health role. And what was always critical was to get the private sector to the table.”

You can watch above (the relevant part starts at the 6:30 mark), via CBS.