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ransomnote: I always assumed white hats made the CDC publish in the NYT that they were sloppy and they didn't follow their own protocols - there's no way they'd admit that otherwise. If the CDC had discovered it internally, or even among its dependents (universities, hospitals), we never would have heard about it. There the CDC, fanning sheer panic and then they had to say, "Garsh, we din know what we wuz doin'."

But 'someone' made them tell us. Here's an article from April 18, 2020 (link to NYT and FRee Republic thread) with an excerpt:

Sloppy laboratory practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused contamination that rendered the nation’s first coronavirus tests ineffective, federal officials confirmed on Saturday.

C.D.C. Labs Were Contaminated, Delaying Coronavirus Testing, Officials Say - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

C.D.C. Labs Were Contaminated, Delaying Coronavirus Testing, Officials Say
NY Times ^ | April 18, 2020 | By Sheila Kaplan

Two of the three C.D.C. laboratories in Atlanta that created the coronavirus test kits violated their own manufacturing standards, resulting in the agency sending tests that did not work to nearly all of the 100 state and local public health labs, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Early on, the F.D.A., which oversees laboratory tests, sent Dr. Timothy Stenzel, chief of in vitro diagnostics and radiological health, to the C.D.C. labs to assess the problem, several officials said. He found an astonishing lack of expertise in commercial manufacturing and learned that nobody was in charge of the entire process, they said.

Problems ranged from researchers entering and exiting the coronavirus laboratories without changing their coats, to test ingredients being assembled in the same room where researchers were working on positive coronavirus samples, officials said. Those practices made the tests sent to public health labs unusable because they were contaminated with the coronavirus, and produced some inconclusive results.

In a statement on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A., Stephanie Caccomo, said, “C.D.C. did not manufacture its test consistent with its own protocol.”

The F.D.A. confirmed its conclusions late this week after several media outlets requested public disclosure of its inquiry, which assuredly is part of a larger federal investigation into the C.D.C. lab irregularities by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Forced to suspend the launch of a nationwide detection program for the coronavirus for a month, the C.D.C. lost credibility as the nation’s leading public health agency and the country lost ground in ways that continue to haunt grieving families, the sick and the worried well from one state to the next.

When the NYT wrote that the CDC 'lost credibility' they were just performing optics. All reporting after that portrayed CDC as the infallible gold-standard of medical professionalism. Interesting the NYT knows how to limbo like that. One day "tsk tsk tsk" and the next day (literally) "KNEEL AND KISS THE RING!"