* Trump declined to use the World Health Organization’s test

The first case of COVID-19 was reported in the U.S. in Washington state in late January 2020. Around that same time, officials in China quarantined Wuhan, the city where the disease was initially detected. By the end of January, the WHO deemed the new virus a global health emergency.

Nevertheless, the U.S. was still in the early stages of rolling out testing for the disease weeks after its first case was reported, resulting in something of a scandal, as cases that could be confirmed multiplied.

According to news reports, diagnostic tests developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were sent out by early February 2020 to public health labs in the U.S. Days later, however, labs were reporting back that the tests weren’t working due to a manufacturing defect. The defective tests, coupled with regulatory red tape that prevented state laboratories from using their own tests, caused further delay.

This resulted in a bevy of accusations that the U.S. “shunned” or “refused” working tests available from WHO even as its own testing protocols fell short. As the BBC reported, “The US declined to use a test approved by the World Health Organization in January — instead, the CDC developed its own coronavirus test. However, there were manufacturing defects with the initial CDC tests which meant many of the results were inconclusive.”

The accusation was even echoed on the presidential election debate stage, with 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden saying: “Look, the World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them. We did not want to get them from them. We wanted to make sure we had our own.”

We sent emails to the CDC and WHO asking about WHO’s test and why it was not adopted in the U.S., but did not get a reply in time for publication. However, WHO told PolitiFact that the organization had never discussed providing testing kits to the United States, and The Washington Post reported that it’s typical, historically, for the U.S. to develop its own methods under such circumstances:

China developed its own test. Leading laboratories in Germany published their own version, which was adopted by the World Health Organization. Many countries, including the United States, developed their own tests.

The traditional U.S. strategy for devising new diagnostic tests starts with the CDC. That is supposed to ensure new tests are accurate and reliable, but it also meant that other parallel approaches were not aggressively pursued.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-coronavirus-test/

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Did President Trump try to cut the Centers for Disease Control's budget

On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., tweeted, “The Trump Administration has slashed CDC funding and left positions charged with managing pandemics vacant. The budget request for Coronavirus funding shows they still don’t understand the magnitude of the threat.”

MORE: WHO raises global coronavirus risk from 'high' to 'very high'
Asked about the criticism at a House budget hearing Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that, “during the president’s tenure, every part of our preparedness and infectious disease program activity has been enhanced and expanded.”

Azar went on the say the president’s budget proposals are just the jumping-off point for budget negotiations.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-cut-cdc...d=69233170
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Trump shut down the entire Global Health Security and Bio-defense agency.
Yes, he did.

Was the White House office for global pandemics eliminated?

One can see the dueling narratives here, neither entirely incorrect. The office — as set up by Obama — was folded into another office. Thus, one could claim the office was eliminated. But the staff slots did not disappear and at least initially the key mission of team remained a priority. So one can also claim nothing changed and thus Biden’s criticism is overstated.

The question that cannot be answered — at least perhaps until a congressionally mandated commission examines the U.S. preparation for this crisis — is whether a separate directorate would have had more clout to bring the issue immediately to the president’s attention. That might have helped buy time to stem the spread of the disease by focusing the full attention of government on the emerging problem. (One example: China refused to let American experts into Wuhan — a discussion kept at the agency level. But early presidential pressure might have swayed Beijing to cooperate.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/...liminated/

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