Asbury Park Press: Did Trump block New Jersey coronavirus test site? Andy Kim thinks so

MARLTON, NJ — Today, the Asbury Park Press published an interview with Rep. Andy Kim on President Trump’s recent comments on slowing down testing, his viral tweet in response, and the failure of the federal government to provide a testing site in South Jersey. “We as a state of New Jersey were in a real crisis with thousands of people dying,” he said. “We asked the federal government for help, and they said no.”

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When U.S. Rep. Andy Kim watched President Donald Trump tell a crowd at a campaign rally this weekend that he directed aides to slow down testing for the coronavirus, he thought back to his frustrations in March and April.

Kim, a Democrat who represents New Jersey’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes Ocean County, had been pushing for a federally-supported testing site in South Jersey similar to centers already set up in Holmdel and Paramus. At the time, New Jersey was in the throes of one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the nation and there were fears the southern part of the state could become the next hot spot.

For weeks, Kim said, he received no response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was supplying the other mass testing sites in the state. Then, in a mid-April meeting with officials from FEMA Region II, which includes New Jersey, Kim said he was told the White House had rejected the proposal.

At the meeting, officials told him the administration didn’t want any additional FEMA-supported mass testing sites in the nation, he said. They didn’t offer an explanation.

“I was really in shock on the call,” Kim said in an interview. “I told them that I thought that was an incredibly dangerous decision.”

A spokesman for FEMA declined to comment.

The episode took on fresh urgency for Kim this weekend when he heard Trump’s comments at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, voicing concern that an increase in testing — something public health experts have said is vital to bringing the pandemic under control — was identifying too many new cases. “A double-edged sword,” Trump called it.

“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” Trump said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”

On Saturday night Kim retweeted a clip of Trump’s comments in Tulsa, linking the president’s complaints about testing with the decision to reject the site he pushed for in South Jersey.

“When I requested FEMA to stand up a Coronavirus test site in South Jersey they told me the White House said no,” Kim wrote. “Now we know why.”

The tweet went viral, attracting more than 55,000 likes and 22,000 retweets.

While Kim said he wasn’t told the White House’s motives for not approving the site in South Jersey, he said it was jarring, months later, to see Trump voice concerns about an expanded testing regime.

“All of the sudden it really just brought me back to crisis we were in in March and April,” he said. The sentiments Trump expressed at the rally “could very well have been the reason we didn’t get a third FEMA testing site,” Kim said.

White House officials have since said Trump wasn’t serious when he made the remark; White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president’s remark was made “in jest.”

But Trump doubled down when asked by reporters Tuesday, saying “I don’t kid” and blaming the large number of cases in the United States relative to other other countries on the number of tests performed.

“By having more cases, it sounds bad, but actually what it is is we’re finding people,” Trump said. He said the United States has performed more than 25 million coronavirus tests, the most of any country in the world. The latest tally is closer to 30 million tests performed nationwide, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. While that’s more than any other country, but other countries including Russia and Portugal rank higher in the number of administered tests relative to their respective populations.

The issue of testing has been at the forefront of criticism of the administration’s handling of the pandemic. Public health experts have said a lack of available test kits allowed outbreaks to mushroom out of control in March and April because officials weren’t able to track how widely the virus was spreading.

As states reopen their economies, experts say testing is crucial to identify and isolate people who have contracted the virus and prevent surges of new cases.

Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the most prominent members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, told a House committee Tuesday that he wasn’t aware of any administration officials who had been told to slow down testing.

“We’re going to be doing more testing, not less,” he told lawmakers.

Kim pushed for the FEMA site in South Jersey at a time when New Jersey was identifying thousands of new COVID-19 cases daily, hospitals were rapidly filling up with sick patients and the death toll was beginning to climb.

Testing remained in short supply nationwide. At FEMA-supported sites in Holdmel and Paramus, anxious residents waited in massive lines to be screened for the virus.

Kim wrote a letter to FEMA March 27, co-signed by New Jersey’s entire Congressional delegation, pressing for a third site, which had been proposed by Gov. Phil Murphy. Kim said he feared the worst of the outbreak was spreading into South Jersey and worried about the large population of senior residents in his district, especially in Ocean County where about 22% of the population is 65 or older.

The proposal for a FEMA-supported testing center in South Jersey never materialized, but Ocean, Burlington and many other counties across the state opened their own drive-thru sites.

The virus has so far not spread as widely in South Jersey compared to the central and southern regions of the state, but in Ocean County there have still been nearly 9,500 confirmed cases and 866 deaths since March, according to the New Jersey Department of Health.

Testing has expanded rapidly nationwide since the early days of the pandemic in March and April with more than a half million people routinely being screened for the virus in recent days, according to data from The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer data collection organization.

New Jersey has regularly been testing more than 20,000 residents daily at more than 200 testing sites. The Trump administration gave the state 550,000 test kits to boost its capacity after Murphy met with Trump in the Oval Office on April 30.

But Kim said there are still concerns about the availability of testing kits, especially for vulnerable seniors who might not be able to make it to testing sites. He hoped to have more screening of asymptomatic residents and increase access to at-home test kits.

Kim said if Trump was joking about curtailing testing it would have been “deeply offensive” amid a deadly pandemic. But Kim said he suspected, based on his own efforts in the spring, that the president was being forthright in his comments about testing.

“We as a state of New Jersey were in a real crisis with thousands of people dying,” he said. “We asked the federal government for help, and they said no.”