The Trump administration’s top health official spent Thursday in Buffalo. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar visited Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and Buffalo General Medical Center where he spoke with the business community and people on the front lines.

Azar got a firsthand look at how Buffalo hospitals are navigating the community’s reopening and resuming elective procedures and other necessary health care while balancing the risks of another potential coronavirus outbreak.

“We’ve got to get people coming back in for the preventive care, for the screenings, the health screenings, that they need," he said.

Azar said the federal government is providing resources and guidance but in many ways is deferring to state and local governments on reopening decisions.

“It’s really important we keep in mind the broad diversity of America," he said. "We’re a large country and each part of it is going to be impacted different. That’s why we like to say the response has to be locally led, state supervised and federally supported.”

The secretary also said he believes direct supervision of nursing homes needs to come from the state. However, he said he is disturbed by the more than 6,000 nursing home patient deaths in New York.

“We have a role also to step in when the state’s fail there but the states have got to take the lead on this. We’ve got to make sure that there’s adequate infection control," he said.

Some federal, state and even local leaders have called for a federal investigation into how the Cuomo administration handled nursing homes at the beginning of the pandemic. Azar said his department has not considered a probe at this point.

“I was obviously concerned about the state’s decision to force nursing homes to take COVID positive patients, especially the way that was done, spreading them to all nursing homes," he said.

The governor has defended the state’s policy, saying he was following Center for Disease Control guidelines.

“There is no CDC guidelines saying you should be taking positive COVID patients and putting them back in the community in nursing homes," Azar said.

The HHS secretary also addressed widespread protests in the past week. He said the federal government respects the right to those protests but said health recommendations remain the same regardless of the setting.

“The actual testing of individuals. That’s something that’s going to be very much a local recommendation. We have not made national recommendations for broad scale testing based on somebody’s activities like that," he said.

Azar said this was his first time in Buffalo. His new spokesperson is Michael Caputo, a WNY native and former Trump campaign staffer, who was also with him at Roswell Park Thursday.