White House economic adviser Peter Navarro's weekend comments blaming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's testing for delaying the administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic were "inaccurate and inappropriate," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Monday.
"The CDC had one error, which was in scaling up the manufacturing of the tests that they had developed," Azar said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom. "There was a contamination that didn't affect the accuracy of the test [but] just led to inconclusive results. They fixed that within weeks and got it out."
On Sunday, Navarro, the director of Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy and the policy coordinator for the National Defense Production Act, said the CDC "really let the country down with the testing."
"Not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test, and that did set us back," Navarro said.
Azar said Monday, "That was never going to be the backbone of testing. That is through public health testing. What we need is the private sector to develop the test, get them in the market, get those high input tests where [they are] delivering over 10 million tests."
In the next "several weeks," 12.9 million tests will be done, and that is from the private sector coming in, not just the CDC, he added.
"That is leveraging this whole government approach that the president has marshaled here," said Azar.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.