Fact check: Trump repeats false claims and Pence misleads on previous testing comments

By Daniel Dale, Tara Subramaniam, Liz Stark and Em Steck, CNN

Updated 11:38 AM ET, Tue April 28, 2020

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump’s Monday coronavirus news conference in the White House Rose Garden was shorter than usual and at least somewhat less acrimonious than many of the briefings he’s held over the past month.

But Trump still made false and misleading claims, most of them repeats from past briefings. And Vice President Mike Pence accused a reporter of a misunderstanding about testing that Pence’s own words had created weeks earlier.

Here are some fact checks from the briefing:

Pence’s testing promises

Pence, Trump and others who spoke at the briefing touted the administration’s plan to dramatically increase coronavirus testing in the coming weeks. (Trump said the number of tests conducted would soon be much more than double the current level.)

A reporter then asked Pence what went wrong before — after his early-March claims that four million tests would be available by the following week. Pence said last Friday, a month and a half after those March comments, that 5.1 million Americans had been tested.

Continued

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Article URL : https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/politics/fact-check-trump-coronavirus-briefing-april-27/index.html