WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump refused to accept any responsibility for the slow rate of coronavirus testing in the United States, saying on Friday that he was "given a set of circumstances" that wasn't meant for the high numbers of potential COVID-19 infections.

"What we've done, and one of the reasons people are respecting what we've done, is we've gotten it done very early, and we've also kept a lot of people out," Trump said during a press conference in the Rose Garden.

During the briefing, NBC's Kristen Welker asked Trump whether he took responsibility for the testing lag, which one member of his own task force called "a failing."

"No, I don't take responsibility at all. Because we were given a — a set of circumstances, and we were given rules, regulations and specifications from a different time. It wasn't meant for this kind of — an event with the kind of numbers that we're talking about," Trump responded.

In reality, America's low rate of COVID-19 testing has drawn criticism from health experts around the world, who say the slow rate of testing obscures the actual rate of infection in the United States, which is likely far higher than tests have so far confirmed.

During the earliest stages of the outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distributed faulty tests to state and local health departments. Once the flawed tests were discovered and discarded, bureaucratic red tape held up the process of granting exemptions to private labs to make their own tests.

As criticism of the Trump administration's coronavirus testing protocol has intensified, and testing in other countries such as South Korea has outpaced the U.S. by orders of magnitude, Trump has sought to shift the blame onto his predecessor, Barack Obama.