(Washington, D.C.) - U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, released the following statement in response to news that Admiral Brett Giroir, Assistant Secretary for Health, would be stepping down as the Trump Administration’s “czar" for COVID-19 testing later this month with no replacement planned, and would resume his former responsibilities at the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Now is not the time to dismantle federal leadership of the COVID-19 response. We still don’t have a comprehensive, clear national strategy to ensure testing is free, fast, everywhere, and accompanied by follow up efforts like contact tracing-so dissolving a role designed to spearhead that effort makes absolutely no sense.
“President Trump and his Administration are going to try in every way they can to pretend they’ve ‘prevailed’ against this pandemic-but let’s be clear: this pandemic is, sadly, by no means over and neither is the federal government’s obligation to lead."
The news comes the week after the Trump Administration submitted a testing plan that Senator Murray and others panned as inadequate to the task at hand. Senator Murray further detailed her concerns with President Trump’s lack of leadership in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in a recent op-ed in the Seattle Times.
