Vice President Mike Pence disagrees with CBS’ John Dickerson that President Donald Trump is “undermining confidence in testing.”
Pence was confronted by Dickerson about some of Trump’s recent remarks including when the president said “if we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases,” as the host noted.
“Given how important testing is, why is the president saying things that are wrong and misleading about testing?” Dickerson asked during Sunday’s “Face the Nation” interview.
The vice president responded by pointing to the increase in coronavirus testing over the past months.
Dickerson, however, pressed, “The president of the United States, with the biggest megaphone on the planet, is saying something about testing that is wrong and misleading. Is that the standard we want for the President of the United States?”
“The president was observing the fact that rising cases, which the media has focused exclusively on, has been, in part, a result of increased testing,” Pence said.
Trump recently said at a campaign rally in Tusla, Oklahoma, he told officials to “slow the testing down” — which he has since said he sometimes says it “sarcastically” about his push to slow down testing and added that less testing is “not the right thing to do.”
See Pence’s comments below (starting at 9:00):
Pence continued:
“What the media doesn’t focus on at all is because of the sacrifices the American people made in those 45 days to slow the spread and the good commonsense measures they continue to do, we’ve continued to see fatalities decline. I grieve for every American family that lost a loved one, for the more than 125,000 Americans that we’ve lost in this. We’re going to continue to take steps to protect the most vulnerable, and testing will be a critical part of that going forward.”
During the same interview, the vice president suggested recent spikes in coronavirus cases in several states is a result of younger Americans “congregating in ways that may have disregarded the guidance that we gave on the federal level for all the phases of reopening,” as IJR reported.