WASHINGTON - The White House rebuked the top US health agency on Sunday , saying"it let the country down" on providing testing crucial to the battle against the coronavirus outbreak.
"Early on in this crisis, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing," Navarro told NBC's"Meet the Press.""Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back."
But Navarro's comments mark the strongest criticism by a named White House official of the CDC's role in the administration's slow roll-out of testing. The United States has the world's largest coronavirus outbreak by far, with more than 88,000 deaths among some 1.5 million confirmed cases, according to Johns Hopkins University.
That places it 39th in the world behind other hard-hit countries like Russia, Italy and Spain, according to trusted online statistics source Worldometer.