White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany is denying that President Donald Trump ordered officials to slow down coronavirus testing.
During her press conference on Monday, McEnany was asked if Trump’s directed officials to slow down coronavirus testing.
“No, he has not directed that,” McEnany said, adding, “Any suggestion that testing has been curtailed is not rooted in fact.”
When asked about Trump’s comments during his campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday when he said he asked officials to slow down testing, McEnany said, “The president was trying to expose, what the media often is they ignore the fact that the United States has more cases because we have more testing.”
“We are leading the world in testing and he was pointing that out,” she added.
When pressed on the matter, McEnany said, “It was a comment that he made in jest. It was a comment that he made in passing.”
However, she stressed that Trump was “not joking about coronavirus,” instead she said, “He was joking about the media and their failure to understand the fact that when you test more, you also find more cases.”
Watch the video below (starting at 6:10):
Earlier on Monday, Trump was asked if he ordered a slow down of testing and he did not answer the question directly, as IJR reported.
He said, “We do more testing than any country in the world by far. Twenty-five million tests, other countries do one million. … As you do more tests, it shows more and more cases.”
And when pressed on if he directed a slow down of testing, he said, “If it did slow down, frankly, I think we’re way ahead of ourselves — if you want to know the truth.”
He added, “We’ve done too good a job. Because every time we go– with 25 million tests you’re going to find more people. So then they say, ‘Oh, we have more cases in the United States.’ The reason we have more cases [is] because we do more testing than any other country by far.”
However, McEnany said Trump was trying to “use that opportunity to extoll the fact that we’ve done more than 25 million tests.”
The latest data finds that the U.S. is leading the world in the number of coronavirus tests conducted per day.
