Appearing Tuesday on CNN’s New Day, Brown University School of Public Health Dean Dr. Ashish Jha said President Joe Biden “dropped the ball” on coronavirus testing.
A partial transcript is as follows:
KAITLAN COLLINS: You saw President Biden yesterday acknowledging, pretty bluntly, that they need to do better when it comes to testing because we are seeing this nationwide shortage of those rapid at-home tests. It’s very difficult to just walk into a store and get one. And what we’re hearing from officials like Dr. Fauci is that they believe they’re gonna have this solved by mid-January, in a few weeks. But, how critical is the window that we’re missing right now for testing?
DR. ASHISH JHA: Oh, I think it’s incredibly critical, and I cannot believe this is where we are almost two years into the pandemic. Everybody saw it coming. We knew we needed more tests. I think the administration dropped the ball on this. They focus a lot on vaccines, which is terrific, vaccines are a really important part of this, but did not pay enough attention to testing. I think it’s been really costly in this holiday season.