Jake Tapper Presses Fauci on U.S. Covid Response: ‘We’re 6 Months Into This and Testing Results Still Take Far Too Long’

Dr. Anthony Fauci joined CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday ahead of the what the White House has billed as the first coronavirus briefing since April — which Fauci said he wouldn’t be at.

Fauci opened the interview emphasizing how the U.S. could seriously “turn things around” people more uniformly engaged in best practices like mask-wearing, hand-washing, and physical distancing.

Tapper said that based on what he has heard from health experts, the U.S. needs “a national campaign of much more aggressive testing, quicker turnaround time for results, and detailed contact tracing.”

“Do you have any idea why the federal government is not attempting a Manhattan Project-like approach to this, going after the virus that way through testing and quick results and contact tracing?” he asked.

“Well, there certainly are attempts to do that. But we still have to make it better,” Fauci responded, acknowledging there are still too many places where it takes days to get testing results, which then “negates the purpose of the contact tracing.”

Tapper asked how the U.S. can do better on that:

“Some of these labs are federal labs. And so theoretically the federal government could put more money into them, buy more supplies, hire more staff. Some of them are private labs, which means that President Trump is the only one who has the power to invoke the Defense Production Act and require more equipment to go to those labs and require that those labs hire more people as an official act. Is it going to take the federal government doing something about it? I mean, because we’re six months into this and testing results still take far too long as even the testing czar Admiral Giroir acknowledged. Is it going to take an act like that from the federal government, from the president to increase the speed?”

Well, I’m not sure what it would take, Jake. But certainly we need to do better when it comes to that,” Fauci diplomatically responded. “There are certain things that are being done quite well in certain areas and in others not. I would say it really is patchy. It isn’t as uniform as we would like, that every single state, city, every county, every place where we need it is doing it at exactly the same level. As a whole we need to improve it.”

You can watch above, via CNN.