Quora: Is the United States’ disastrous trade war with China the reason we don’t have Covid-19 test kits by the millions like most other countries seem to have?

Ridzwan Abdul Rahman replied

The shortage of test kits in the US has nothing to do with the trade war. In fact, despite the trade war and despite the US not helping China when China was fighting the virus, Jack Ma of Alibaba, China, has donated 500,000 test kits to the US.

The reason for the shortage is Trump’s insistence that US should develop its own test kit. CDC did develop the test kits but the first batch turned out to be faulty. Then, further production was delayed by a shortage of some reagents that need to be imported from Europe.