Sarah Silbiger for CNN

During the debate, former Vice President Joe Biden claimed that the US chose not to take testing kits for the coronavirus from the World Health Organization.

“Look, the World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now,” Biden said. “We refused them. We did not want to buy them. We did not want to get them from them. We wanted to make sure we had our own.”

Facts first: Biden is correct. The US, along with other countries, chose not to take test kits from WHO – and instead decided to make their own.

Laboratories in Germany developed tests to detect the coronavirus which WHO adopted and by March 3, WHO sent out test kits to 47 countries. Other countries, like the US and China, chose to develop their own tests, according to the Washington Post.

That decision by the US government not to take the WHO test kits has come under scrutiny as testing has been slow to roll out across the country and due to some early failures to verify those tests at other laboratories in the US. On February 12, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that some of the coronavirus test kits shipped to labs across the country were not working as they should.

As a result, the CDC remade parts of the test kits after some produced inconclusive test results.

As of Sunday, almost two months after the coronavirus was first detected in the US, 22,713 specimens had been tested in the US. Experts have criticized the country’s seeming inability to produce more tests.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the experts leading the administration’s response to the coronavirus, told Congress Thursday that the US was “failing” when it came to getting Americans tested.

“It is a failing, let’s admit it,” Fauci said. “The idea of anybody getting it easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that.”