Trump White House created a national testing plan -- and killed it thinking virus would hit blue states the worst

For months White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner and his team of friends, financiers and billionaires, worked to create a national coronavirus testing plan. They succeeded, after reaching out to public health experts. But the plan was killed because they thought the deadly pandemic was hitting blue states worst, and would not spread to red states, according to an extensive exposé by Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban.

As the nationwide plan to test widely for coronavirus, a plan that included contact tracing, was finalized, Kushner decided it did not serve President Donald Trump politically, and it was scrapped.

As one person who worked closely on the project revealed, the plan “just went poof into thin air.”

A public health expert in “frequent contact” with the White House Coronavirus Task Force “said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically.”

“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

“It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert added.

The plan was massive.

It would have established “a national Sentinel Surveillance System” with “real-time intelligence capabilities to understand leading indicators where hot spots are arising and where the risks are high vs. where people can get back to work,” Eban reveals.

And it “called for the federal government to coordinate distribution of test kits, so they could be surged to heavily affected areas, and oversee a national contact-tracing infrastructure.”

That never happened.

“It proposed a massive scale-up of antibody testing to facilitate a return to work.”

That never happened.

“It called for mandating that all COVID-19 test results from any kind of testing, taken anywhere, be reported to a national repository as well as to state and local health departments.”

That never happened.

Read the entire report at Vanity Fair.