Mick Mulvaney, the South Carolina Republican who recently served as President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, is criticizing the state of coronavirus testing in America. Mulvaney, still part of the Trump administration, calls it – or, his family’s experience with it – “simply inexcusable.”
In a CNBC op-ed Monday Mulvaney expressed his desire for any coronavirus funds to be given not to the people in the U.S. to help them pay their rent or mortgages or put food on the table, but to be spent on the root cause of the crisis: finding a cure for the virus itself.
Mulvaney infamously at the end of February claimed the media was only covering coronavirus because it wanted to attack Trump. He also claimed getting COVID-19 was “not a death sentence.” More than 135,000 Americans to date have died from the virus.
As recently as late May, Mulvaney was on cable news, promoting Trump administration spin, declaring America had “overreacted” to the coronavirus pandemic. He cited statistics he claimed showed the flu had recently killed 100,000 in a single season.
But now that his family has been moderately affected, he’s singing a different tune.
“I know it isn’t popular to talk about in some Republican circles, but we still have a testing problem in this country,” Mulvaney, now the U.S. Special Envoy for Northern Ireland, writes.
“My son was tested recently; we had to wait 5 to 7 days for results. My daughter wanted to get tested before visiting her grandparents, but was told she didn’t qualify. That is simply inexcusable at this point in the pandemic.”
He doesn’t say what the results of his son’s test were.
California Democrat Eric Swalwell weighed in on Mulvaney’s recent revelation.