Azar champions Trump coronavirus response

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar championed the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic in a pair of Sunday news show appearances — his first major ones since March 1 amid reports the health official has been sidelined in the White House’s public-facing Covid-19 response.

Azar on Sunday defended the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite the agency’s delays in rolling out a coronavirus test earlier this year. He also confirmed, but downplayed, the laboratory contamination problem that had reportedly delayed the testing rollout.

“I don’t believe the CDC let this country down,” Azar said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation. “I believe the CDC serves an important public health role.”

“The CDC had an issue as they scaled up manufacturing of tests to get them out to about 90 public health labs,” Azar added. “There was apparently a contamination at an end stage there on the third part of the reagent that never led to false negatives or false positives, but that prevented some of the scale-up for a couple of weeks. But that was never going to be the backbone of testing, of broad mass testing in the United States.”

Not all Trump administration officials got that messaging memo on Sunday. In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” White House trade adviser and resident China hawk Peter Navarro said the CDC “really let the country down.”

“Early on in this crisis, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing,” Navarro told host Chuck Todd. “Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back.”

Azar, who had been largely absent from the public eye since appearing on multiple Sunday morning TV shows on March 1, also weighed in on “ Operation Warp Speed ” — the White House’s recently unveiled effort to speed up development of a coronavirus vaccine.

“These drug companies and vaccine-makers, they all said it’s going to take this amount of time because they’re using their traditional approaches,” Azar said. “Well, the president said that’s not acceptable. So what we’re doing is wringing the inefficiency out of the development process to make the development side faster to get to safe and effective vaccines.”

The HHS secretary said research groups and drug companies had about 100 vaccine candidates originally and that they’ve since narrowed it down to the 14 most promising. “And we’re going to keep narrowing that down to maybe four or five, six, that we really place the big financial bets behind and drive on,” he added.

Pressed by CBS host Margaret Brennan, however, Azar declined to guarantee President Donald Trump’s stated goal of hundreds of millions of vaccines by the end of 2020. All of the vaccines are still being developed and tested, and scientists can’t guarantee they will be safe, effective and broadly available on Trump’s aggressive timeline.

In a separate interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Azar referred to a vaccine as only one part of a “multifactorial response program” to the coronavirus.

“First is the testing we talked about before, broad surveillance to find cases, surge in and contain. Also, therapeutics,” he told host Jake Tapper. “From that, we deliver a vaccine. It’s a multifactorial approach that will help us get the disease burden down and use traditional public health tools so we have our weddings, so we visit our grandparents, so we resume normal life at school and work.”