Dr. Anthony Fauci said during a Congressional hearing Tuesday that President Donald Trump has never directed him to "slow down" the amount of coronavirus testing being conducted in the U.S. in order to prevent new cases from being reported.
Fauci added that to his knowledge, Trump had not issued such a direction to anyone else on the coronavirus task force.
In addition, Fauci said that the U.S. would be conducting more testing in the coming months and increasing contact tracing abilities.
Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also denied that he had been told by Trump to limit the number of tests.
On Saturday, at a rally in Oklahoma, Trump said that he asked officials in his administration to "slow down" testing capacity in order to keep the number of confirmed cases steady. During a briefing on Monday press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany said that Trump's comments were made "in jest."
However, in an interview with Scripps national politics editor Joe St. George, Trump did not specifically say if he asked officials to slow down testing, but added that "if it did slow down, frankly, I think we're way ahead of ourselves."
