In a piece for Vox , Aaron Rupar picked apart Donald Trump ‘s recent claim that Barack Obama ‘s administration left him with “obsolete,” “old,” and “broken” coronavirus tests.
“This is totally nonsensical,” he wrote. “The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] couldn’t have bad tests left over from the Obama administration, because the coronavirus test didn’t exist until this year.”
Rupar also pushed back against Trump’s claim that the Strategic National Stockpile of personal protective equipment was empty.
“And the stockpile was far from empty — its problem was that it was poorly maintained, an issue that rests on the Trump administration’s shoulders.”
He later pointed to a FactCheck.org report that suggested the stockpile was “packed with stuff” in 2016. However, as The Inquisitr previously reported, a separate fact check by USA Today concluded that the Obama administration did not take significant steps to restock N95 masks after they were depleted, despite calls to action from experts that pointed to the danger of future pandemics.
“We inherited a lot of garbage … horrible ventilators” — Trump responds to a second question from ultra-sycophantic OAN, this one about coronavirus testing failures, by trying to shift blame to Obama (Obama left office in 2017 and the virus didn’t reach the US until 2020) pic.twitter.com/II60SLGOrn
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 19, 2020
Rupar also noted that Trump was president for three years before the first coronavirus case was reported in America on January 20 earlier this year. Even at this time, the writer claims that the president did not begin replenishing national stockpiles of masks, ventilators, and other medical supplies.
Trump has seemingly shifted the blame for his coronavirus failures to the Obama administration on many occasions, and it’s not the first instance he has pointed to faulty tests. As pointed out by PolitiFact , the president has claimed that the CDC inherited problematic tests that did not function on multiple occasions.
“That’s been there a long time,” he said at the end of March. “Now we have the best tests in the world.”
Like Rupar, PolitiFact noted that it’s impossible to inherit a broken test from a time when the novel coronavirus did not yet exist.
Christopher Mores, an infectious disease researcher at George Washington University’s School of Public Health, echoed the pair.
“The (Centers for Disease Control) designed it and validated it and deployed it,” Mores said of the CDC-developed COVID-19 test, which was found to have “multiple problems.”
Trump has also blamed the Obama administration for creating a policy he claims hindered the development of the testing process. According to PolitiFact , the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules did hamper the process for private labs. But the method in question reportedly dates back to George W. Bush ‘s administration.
Even still, Bush warned of a pandemic back in 2005 and attempted to create a pandemic response system. The former president was reportedly driven into action after he read a book about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that is estimated to have killed 50 to100 million people.
