The White House has deployed a SWAT team of fixers and technocrats to ramp up coronavirus testing, in an implicit acknowledgment that the Trump administration’s response has continued to fall short of what is needed
As hospitals grapple with more coughing and feverish emergency-room visitors than they can test, the White House has deployed a SWAT team of fixers and technocrats to ramp up coronavirus testing, in an implicit acknowledgment that the Trump administration’s response has continued to fall short of what is needed.
While Johns Hopkins University on Monday reported more than 4,287 confirmed cases of coronavirus across the United States, the true number could easily be more than 10 times higher at this point. That’s complicated medical professionals’ efforts to focus their resources and hurt public health officials’ effort to marshal a response.
Outside experts in health care delivery and technology, like Flatiron Health CEO Nat Turner, also have been brought in as advisers. Tapping officials like Giroir and Boehler, who have steered multiple administration priorities like President Donald Trump’s HIV/AIDS strategy and kidney-care overhaul, and a technocrat like Smith, is a tacit acknowledgment of management failures with the existing strategy, said two individuals, with the Trump administration cycling through multiple leaders and tactics — and officials trading blame for why testing has run so far behind.
Vice President Mike Pence took over the response from Azar about three weeks ago, amid frustrations about the state of the effort and whether Azar's public health deputies had been too alarmist in their messages. But Pence has focused on coordinating the larger message and his office has lacked operational support to execute on specific initiatives, said two individuals.of White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, in the administration's coronavirus response.
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