The Media Said Trump Didn’t Have a COVID Testing Strategy. The Media Was Wrong.

[PeteS in CA]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/coronavirus-media-wrong-about-trump-testing-strategy/

The Media Said Trump Didn’t Have a COVID Testing Strategy. The Media Was Wrong.

The story of how the country went from nothing to more than half-a-million COVID tests on some days is a tale of inspired private–public cooperation. After bad initial stumbles when the Centers for Disease Control fouled up the initial test (at a time when it had a monopoly on testing) and when a Food and Drug Administration regulatory bottleneck stymied the development of testing in the private sector, the administration found its footing.

It used cooperative data, governmental authorities, relationships with the private sector, and improvisation-on-the-fly to work through supply shortages and other problems. Giroir’s team, a group of trouble-shooting aides around White House adviser Jared Kushner, the FDA, and the Department of Health and Human Services all played important roles. Meanwhile, private companies — often working hand-and-glove with the administration — quickly innovated and scaled up their production of everything from swabs to test kits.
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There has been a lot of media attention, and justifiably so, on the initial CDC and FDA foul-ups and the initial overpromising on testing. But as the administration moved beyond that and pursued a considered but urgent approach to testing, the media persisted in harsh critiques that betrayed a misunderstanding of what was really happening.

The media often insisted that there was no testing plan, simply because the plan wasn’t centralized enough, a line of attack pursued by Democrats as well.
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... In early May, Chuck Schumer and his Senate colleagues wrote the administration that they were “deeply troubled by the lack of detail and strategy in your testing blueprint, and we fundamentally reject the notion that the federal government bears this little responsibility in increasing testing capacity. The Trump Administration must not shirk its responsibilities and leave states and tribes to fend for themselves.”

In late May, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer  for choosing to “dump the burden onto the states.”

Schumer has continually agitated for use of the Defense Production Act (DPA), sometimes sounding as if he’s unaware that it’s actually been employed, if not as often or as sweepingly as he’d like. “The president will invoke the Defense Production Act for meat plants, but not for testing,” he complained on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in early May.

He predicted that “there will be no way to ramp up and get the number of tests, and the auxiliary things like the swabs that we need, unless the federal government takes over.”
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The Trump administration’s general approach was to catalyze and support the private sector while working with the states to identify the testing capacity available to them and to secure the necessary supplies to meet their goals. The FDA worked to approve new tests and technologies as rapidly as possible, which was enormously important to nearly every aspect of testing. The Defense Production Act was used, but sparingly, and as way to buttress companies rather than take them over.

The emphasis was on improvisation and innovation. “It was very clear that the normal institutions of government under any administration wasn’t going to solve this and could not solve it, particularly in a country as vast as America,” says Giroir.

This is a very long article, well worth the time. However National Review might accurately be characterized, NR has NOT been Trumpista.

Basically, what the Dems demanded was what the CDC had already demonstrated was inadequate and susceptible to abject failure in the face of a "simple" mistake. At the outset of testing, the CDC made a foolish decision and a serious blunder. The foolish decision was to be the sole-source for tests. The CDC would not have had the capacity to produce and process the number of kits that would prove necessary. But before that brown odoriferous material clogged the air circulation device, a simple blunder in the production line affecting the pilot run of test kits (cross-contamination rendering the kits useless) forced a course change to multiple private companies producing their own tests that were optimized for their own production processes and test equipment.

While the CDC's blunder cost a 3-5 week delay, the course change prevented the CDC becoming a horrific bottleneck in kit production and test processing. Chuckles' "solution" of the government taking over everything would have been a horrific fiasco.

What Giroir, Kushner, and team did instead was to enable private companies to mass produce, find where existing equipment was located, inform local and state government people where the resources needed were located, and facilitate keeping those resources supplied.

The outcome is that testing got started around early March, started catching up to demand in late April, and by late May supply/capacity was starting to exceed demand. There's a reason testing has drifted out of the center of the Dems' and MSM's attack radar screen. They don't want to explain how the US "magically" went from near-zero testing to excess capacity in under 3 months.