President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Phoenix, photo by Gage Skidmore.
National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty this week called out President Donald Trump for pushing what he describes as "vaporware" solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dougherty starts by detailing how Trump is still resisting building the kind of test-and-trace operation that countries such as Germany and South Korea have used to decrease deaths and partially reopen their economies.
"We’ve gotten lots of advertising and an implicit promise of a world-class operation to fight the disease," he writes. "But it doesn’t exist yet and it’s becoming clearer that the White House is spinning its wheels, looking for something -- anything -- to do other than solving the crisis at hand."
He then zeroes in on Trump's Rose Garden press event in late March in which he brought a group of CEOs to the White House and promised the rapid roll out of drive-through testing sites.
"By the end of April, Google’s health-care oriented company, Verily, had launched a pilot website covering only the Bay Area," he writes. "As May begins, the promised testing centers exist in fewer than a dozen of the retailers Trump touted. CVS has rapid testing in five states, with plans to expand. Walgreens has drive-through testing operations in eight states. Both plan to expand their testing capacity, but they won’t be able to meet demand until well after many Americans emerge from lockdown -- and it won’t make too big a difference so long as CDC guidelines on who can get tested remain relatively strict."
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