President Donald Trump's administration bungled yet another opportunity to contain COVID-19, the novel coronavirus that's currently spreading around the United States and other parts of the world.
This latest misstep comes with the news that the administration will fail to meet a key promise it made in regards to the availability of crucial testing kits.
The Food and Drug Administration announced on Monday that it would produce one million new testing kits by the end of the week. The promise came after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rolled out hundreds of diagnostic tests which produced inconclusive results. Vice President Mike Pence pledged this number as recently as Wednesday.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar confirmed, however, that the real figure would be less than a tenth of the million promised coming from the government.
Watch below.
Azar said:
"By the end of the week we believe we'll have shipped enough for 75,000 people to be tested."
A lack of availability in tests could present a severe undercount in diagnoses of the virus, making its containment even more insurmountable.
People took the failure to meet a million as yet another example of the Trump administration's mixed messages.
Others said this promise was doomed to failure, and weren't shocked by the news.
The CDC confirmed today that there are now at least 129 confirmed cases of the virus in the United States.
