In a shocking admission during his Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally on Saturday night, President Donald Trump said he had told officials to slow down coronavirus testing because of the rising number of cases in America.
“You know testing is a double-edged sword,” Trump said, while complaining about media coverage of his handling of the virus.
“Here’s the bad part,” he said. “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people; you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please.”
Nearly 120,000 people have died in the United States from the coronavirus and medical experts have said that testing is critical to identifying cases, tracing them and stopping the spread of the virus.
After Trump made the comment about testing, an administration official told CNN that the president was “obviously kidding” when he said that he asked for a slowdown.
A racist term: At another point during the rally, Trump said Covid-19 had more names than any other disease.
“I can name Kung Flu,” he said, using the racist term. “I can name 19 different versions of them.”
Trump had previously referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus.”
When pressed on why he used that term back in March, he said: “‘Cause it comes from China. It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. I want to be accurate.”
