At an evening news briefing, Trump said his administration has increased the scale and quality of testing. He said officials have been working with governors and that there have been “no complaints from any of them.”

On Wednesday morning, he said the virus would disappear of its own accord. “This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away,” Trump said in a telephone interview with Fox News.

Biggest Force
But the united states -- rather than the United States -- are sending a message not only to Trump, but to companies that would be crucial to a recovery. They’re signaling strong market demand for the rapid tests, something more commonly seen on the federal level, said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Still, it remains to be seen how these tests will be deployed, what additional orders the states will place, and what screenings may be required to confirm results, she said.

“There’s certainly a need for testing of all kinds,” Gronvall said. But when it comes to “how much of a difference it’s going to make, we have more questions than we have answers.”

The U.S. leads the world in its number of coronavirus cases, with Americans accounting for more than a quarter of infections worldwide and a fifth of total deaths. The nation’s shaky testing infrastructure has frustrated many public-health experts, not to mention test-takers, who complain of waiting a week or longer for results. The Trump administration has instead left responsibility to states, with the federal government providing some supplies and doling out funds for the purchase of machinery.

The pact announced Tuesday could significantly expand testing in the member states. Each performed between roughly 330,000 and 844,000 coronavirus tests last month, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project. The pact calls for each to receive 500,000 tests.

In a sense, the agreement is the revenge of a tweedy establishment that Trump -- a product of outer-borough New York -- has long derided.

The Rockefeller Foundation, which was founded by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller more than a century ago and has more than $4 billion in assets, has its headquarters a mile south of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

The charity has a mission of improving “the well-being of humanity throughout the world.” It has long worked in public health, with a history in yellow fever and malaria. Today its head is Rajiv Shah, a physician and former U.S. Agency for International Development administrator during the Obama administration who led responses to crises like the Ebola pandemic in West Africa.

Ambitious Plans
The foundation became involved in the U.S. testing strategy in late April. It put out an ambitious plan calling for “launching the largest public health testing program in U.S. history,” with the help of thousands of small labs, billions in investments and the use of digital platforms to track the screenings and manage supply needs.

The foundation released a second report in mid-July, saying that although the U.S. has surpassed the amount of testing it called for back in April, long turnaround times made results “practically worthless.”