A White House group tapped to create a national testing plan in the beginning months of the coronavirus pandemic reportedly scrapped their proposal in part because the virus was hitting “blue states” the hardest, according to Vanity Fair.

Katherine Eban reported on the group’s secret testing plan in a new report, which included the revelation that the team, led by White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, bought 3.5 million Covid-19 tests for $52 million from an Abu Dhabi–based artificial intelligence company. They were never used, deemed “contaminated and unusable.”

Kushner’s team created a report designed for President Donald Trump to read aimed at fixing challenges like “uneven testing capacity and supplies throughout the U.S., both between and within regions, significant delays in reporting results (4-11 days), and national supply chain constraints, such as PPE, swabs, and certain testing reagents.”

The plan was a “starting point,” Eban writes, but it didn’t come together because people in April thought the virus would soon go away. Vanity Fair continues:

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert 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.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

Kushner’s plan to create a federal testing operation was officially tossed when Trump announced his plan to shift testing responsibilities to individual states on April 27 during a press briefing.

Other organizations, like the Rockefeller Foundation, have attempted to create a national testing plan as over 150,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 so far. On Friday, the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus will hold a hearing to advocate for a national testing plan, more than three months after Kushner’s initial plan was scrapped.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/3jZlB9Q