Sisolak presses Pence over coronavirus testing slowdown

WASHINGTON — Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak pressed Vice President Mike Pence to make a commitment there would be no federal slowdown on testing, in reference to “not helpful” remarks President Donald Trump made during a campaign rally Saturday night.

White House and campaign aides have maintained that Trump was being tongue-in-cheek when he told an unusually unpacked room in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that more testing means “you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow down the testing, please.”

On a conference call with the nation’s governors, Pence said, “And just rest assured we’re going to continue to partner with you on testing. I think the president’s observation was a passing observation in his remarks.”

Pence press secretary Devin O’Malley said the vice president told governors “we are finding more people” who have contracted COVID-19 and faulted the media for failing to connect the dots.

And White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany echoed Pence’s statement when she told reporters Monday that Trump “was joking about the media and their failure to understand the fact that when you test more, you also find more cases.”

Not a joke

“Unfortunately for Americans all across the country, it was clear he was not joking,” Kate Bedingfield, director of communications for former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, told Fox News on Monday.

“The proof is in the pudding. We’re months out now from Donald Trump having said that anyone who wants a test can get one,” Bedingfield added, in a reference to Trump’s March 6 statement.

According to the COVID Tracking Project, more than 27 million tests had been administered in the United States as of Sunday. On March 1, 85 tests were administered. On April 1, 108,056 tests were administered, and nearly 300,000 tests were administered on May 1. On Sunday, 518,347 were given.

According to the same database, 241,691 tests had been administered in Nevada as of Sunday.

Last week, Trump told a roundtable, “If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases. If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

Factcheck.org wrote of Trump’s comments, “To some extent he’s right — if there were less testing, then the reported number of cases would be lower, although of course those infections would still exist.”

The fact-checking organization also reported that the United States has conducted the highest number of tests per country but also that the U.S. fell behind 16 countries in regard to tests per-capita and fared less well than 50 countries in the percentage of tests that are positive — 9 percent in the U.S.

No fear of numbers

Speaking to the argument that increased testing accounts for the high number of cases in America, medical ethicist Art Caplan told the Review Journal, “It can’t be true because the rate of positivity has been going up more than the rate of doing the tests.”

“Numbers should not frighten anybody,” said Caplan, who spoke in favor of boosted test-taking. “We certainly don’t need less numbers, we need more numbers.”

Trump delivered his slow-tests remark during his first campaign rally since March — an event that backfired with a vengeance. The Trump campaign boasted that it had received requests for 1 million tickets, and Trump predicted a packed house even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that large gatherings in enclosed spaces put participants at high risk of contracting COVID-19.

Trump fans chose to stay home in droves. The president found himself talking, not to 19,000 attendees and an overflow crowd, but a venue dotted with empty blue seats above Trump fans sporting red MAGA hats.

‘Inappropriate and insensitive’

The event did not play well with some Nevadans.

“Whether he was joking or not joking, I thought it was inappropriate and quite honestly, insensitive,” said former Nevada Republican Party Chairwoman Amy Tarkanian, as she recalled friends and acquaintances who saw nothing funny in getting the virus.

Tarkanian also offered that Sisolak, a Democrat, had asked an excellent question given the high number of Nevadans who are testing positive. She called Pence’s response a “non-answer.”

Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., said Trump’s remarks show he is more concerned about improving numbers than fighting the coronavirus.

“Testing and tracing save lives and are vital to Southern Nevada’s economic recovery. Yet, somehow President Trump doesn’t seem to care about any of that,” Titus said. “This is just the latest example of Donald Trump putting his own perceived political interests ahead of the national welfare. I’m grateful to Governor Sisolak for standing up for Nevadans’ safety and pushing back on this administration’s ignorance and ineptitude.”

Sisolak and Trump got off to a rocky start shortly after Sisolak’s election in 2018.

Attending his first National Governors’ Association meeting in Washington in February 2019, Sisolak, a Democrat, refused to attend events hosted by the Republican president and vice president in what Sisolak described as a protest of a shipment of weapons-grade plutonium to a federal facility northwest of Las Vegas the year before.

At the time Mark Harkins, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told the Review-Journal, “I can see why the governor didn’t want to be a prop in that situation. But it does beg the question: How are you going to fix the problem if you don’t sit down and talk?”

Contact Debra J. Saunders at 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.