Pelosi: Fauci’s testing recommendation ‘hasn’t been done’

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Sunday that despite National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci’s endorsement of the Trump administration’s rapid coronavirus testing plan as a step toward reopening the economy, “it hasn’t been done.”

“On March 4th, we passed our first bill, bipartisan. Testing. Testing. Testing. It’s over six weeks since then. And it hasn’t been done,” Pelosi said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“But he’s right, it has to be testing. It has to be … contact tracing. It has to be treatment. And it has to be quarantine. It’s part of something bigger as well to be done properly. But we’re way late on it and that is a failure,” Pelosi said.

“The president gets an F, a failure on the testing,” she added.

Fox’s Chris Wallace also asked Pelosi about an interview and walking tour she gave from San Francisco’s Chinatown in February, encouraging visits to the neighborhood, and asked if it was comparable to statements by Trump administration officials  around the same time minimizing the threat of the virus.

Pelosi denied the two were comparable, saying the purpose of her visit was to discourage stigma against Chinese-Americans, who have been the target of increased racist harassment since the beginning of the pandemic.

“What we’re trying to do is to end the discrimination, the stigma, that was going out against the Asian-American community. And in fact, if you will look, the record will show that our Chinatown has been a model of containing and preventing the virus,” she said. “So I’m confident in our folks there and thought it was necessary to offset some of the things that the president and others were saying about Asian-Americans and making them a target of violence across the country and some hate crimes they committed.”