Sen. Mitt Romney on Tuesday admonished the Trump administration for touting its coronavirus testing operation in recent days after weeks of missteps, accusing the White House’s testing czar of playing politics.
“I understand that politicians are going to frame data in a way that is most positive politically,” the Utah Republican told Adm. Brett Giroir, a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, during a Senate hearing on the pandemic. “Of course, I don’t expect that from admirals.”
Romney pointed out that the day before, Giroir stood in the White House Rose Garden and “celebrated” the U.S. surpassing South Korea’s number of coronavirus tests conducted per capita, after South Korea’s handling of its outbreak came to be viewed as something of a gold standard around the world.
“But you ignored the fact that they accomplished theirs at the beginning of the outbreak, while we treaded water during February and March,” the senator continued. “And, as a result, by March 6 the U.S. had completed just 2,000 tests, whereas South Korea had conducted more than 140,000 tests.”
The Trump administration’s failure to facilitate widespread testing in the U.S. from the outset has been widely criticized, and is seen by many — including Romney — as one of the major reasons the virus was able to spread, undetected and unchecked, throughout the country in February and March.
It was “partially” because of the White House’s lag, Romney asserted, that South Korea’s death toll from the virus is only around 250 while the U.S. death toll has surpassed 81,000, despite each country publicly reporting its first coronavirus cases on the same day.
“I find our testing record nothing to celebrate whatsoever,” Romney said.
The White House has made serious progress in expanding testing capabilities in recent weeks — though public-health experts have warned that millions more tests per week are needed to safely reopen the country — and held the Rose Garden news briefing on Monday in which Giroir spoke to highlight those improvements.
“If you look at per capita, everyone talks about South Korea being the standard today,” Giroir said on Monday. “We will have done more than twice their per capita rate of testing that was accomplished in South Korea.”
At that event, President Donald Trump boasted that the United States has “prevailed on testing” as he rolled out a plan to help states test at least 2 percent of their populations — or 12.9 million people — in the month of May. In Tuesday’s hearing, Giroir predicted that the figure nationwide could be ramped up to 50 million by September.
The White House has bristled at the continued criticism, as detractors assert that the uptick in testing is too little too late. In a briefing at the White House on Tuesday, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany complained to reporters about coverage of the previous day’s event.
“You can’t demand that we reach South Korea and say that we are bragging when we do,” she said.
But Romney, a frequent critic of Trump and the only Republican in Congress to vote to convict the president earlier this year on an article of impeachment, posited that there was a grim reason for testing numbers in the United States having caught up to South Korea’s.
“The fact is their test numbers are going down, down, down now, because they don’t have the kind of outbreak we have,” he said of South Korea. “Ours are going up, up, up as they have to. I think that’s an important lesson for us as we think about the future.”