BARACK Obama's former national security adviser bashed Donald Trump for blaming the Center for Disease Control's slow rollout of COVID-19 testing on his predecessor.

On Friday, Trump criticized the CDC for its "inadequate and slow" testing and asserted that the Obama administration's had "complicated" the process.

"For decades the @CDCgov looked at, and studied, its testing system but did nothing about it," Trump tweeted.

"It would always be inadequate and slow for a large scale pandemic, but a pandemic would never happen, they hoped.

"President Obama made changes that only complicated things further."

He then slammed the former US president's handling of the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic as a "full scale disaster."

But the following day, former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes shot back at the president during an MSNBC interview and called out Trump for dismantling the pandemic directorate in 2018.

He cited a lack of leadership as the cause of the "patchwork" outbreak response.

"I think, importantly, what Obama did leave Trump is a global health infrastructure that we had set up informed by the lessons of the Ebola outbreak," he said.

"And what we did set up in the White House…an office that was responsible for managing pandemics, managing global health threats that was shut down two years ago by President Trump.

"And when you don't have an office like that, you don't have dedicated people inside the White House who are ensuring that information is acted on."

Rhodes noted the contrasts in Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic and how Obama handled the Ebola outbreak, namely that the latter consulted government officials who "had real expertise on how to deal with this."

He took a dig at Trump's incessant tweeting, saying that he "again seems to turn to his Twitter feed and try to do just enough to get him through the news cycle, while not preparing the nation for what's necessary here."

Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser from 2009 to 2017, was instrumental in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal under President Obama in 2015.

The CDC has faced backlash for dragging its feet on testing for the novel coronavirus, which has killed at least 86 people and infected more than 4,400 in the US.

As the pandemic rages on, experts gave a dire prediction Tuesday: COVID-19 could kill 11 times more Americans than cancer, with 6.9 million people killed in a "worst-case scenario".

The US economy could also be at risk – while speaking to reporters at the White House Monday, Trump said the deadly virus could trigger a recession.

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