‘Perhaps that’s been the story of life’: Trump on why professional athletes are getting tested for coronavirus and others aren’t
At a Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the White House, President Trump was asked if it’s right for professional athletes and other well-connected people to get tested for the coronavirus while others can’t. Trump said, “No, I wouldn’t say so, but perhaps that’s been the story of life. That does happen on occasion.”
Video Transcript
- How are non-symptomatic professional athletes getting tests, while others are waiting in line and can't get them? Do the well-connected go to the front of the line?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, you'd have to ask them that question. I mean, they--
- Should that happen?
DONALD TRUMP: No, I wouldn't say so. But perhaps that's been the story of life. That does happen on occasion. And I've noticed where some people have been tested fairly quickly. Look, we inherited a very--
- Would you encourage them to defer their tests to others?
DONALD TRUMP: Excuse me. Excuse me. We inherited a very obsolete system. This was a system that was out of date, obsolete, or it was a system that was never meant to take care of the kind of quantity-- the number of people that we're talking about. Millions and millions of people. If you go back in years past, like even recently, with the flu. Nobody had tests before. They didn't test the entire nation to see whether or not they had flu. They got the flu, they got better, hopefully, they got better, that was it.
Now, all of a sudden, they do this very complex testing-- what we've done is we've broken it down, we've broken up the system, but it was obsolete, and/or you could say it was also a system that just wasn't meant to handle the kind of volume that you're talking about. We've rebuilt it into a system that, for the future, will be a very good system, if you want to go this route. But this was never done before, and I would imagine it will be done in the future.
But we built it into a very good system by using private companies. The great private companies. And I have to say, Roche has been doing a very good job. They're doing a lot of work. A very good job. But this was an obsolete system. This was not a system that was meant to do anything like this or even near this.
