Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says ‘wealthy and powerful’ may be getting faster access to coronavirus testing than average Americans.
By World Israel News Staff
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez implied that “wealthy and powerful” Americans may have better access to coronavirus testing than Americans who are trying to get tested, FOX News reported Friday.
Interviewed on the program Fox News’ “Special Report,” the outspoken Democratic Congresswoman from New York criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus health crisis.
With the virus testing lagging behind the infection rate, Ocasio-Cortez said it was now questionable as to whether or not the American health care system was the best in the world and suggested that the “wealthy and powerful” might be getting tested for coronavirus ahead of average Americans.
“That’s something that’s up for debate,” Ocasio-Cortez said, claiming that South Koreans were being tested at a rate of “up to 10,000 tests per day” for the COVID-19 virus, while U.S. testing lagged far behind.
“They’ve been able to provide tests to any single person that wants it – and here [in the U.S.] people are scrambling,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It almost seems like the more wealthy and powerful you are, the more able you are to access a test.”
Although she gave no evidence to back up her allegation of rich people going to the front of the line, media reports said NBA players and support staff were reportedly tested, or scheduled for testing, after two players on the Utah Jazz were revealed to have previously tested positive for the virus, FOX reported.
In Washington, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health – a member of President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force – appeared to back up Ocasio-Cortez’s allegation that America was slower than other much smaller nations in testing its citizens.
Fauci told a House panel that the U.S. health system was not “geared to what we need right now,” the Fox report said. “That is a failing… Let’s admit it.”
He said the private-medicine focus of the American system was such that “the idea of anybody getting it easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that.”