The CDC so throughly screwed up testing at the beginning of this and set the US back by week in dealing with Coronavirus, according even to the Washington Post. That it of all sites ripped into gov’t is quite telling.
Yeah, it is so very annoying to see the MSM continue beating their 3+ year hate Trump war drums. Everything is Trump’s fault. Like he’s supposed to personally manage every agency. If so, then why bother having these agencies at all?
It is so patently clear that the CDC (and HHS) and the FDA screwed this up. There was an article in the Washington Examiner, quoting the LA Times and Bloomberg, that the CDC used up 100 million masks during the 2009 swine flu epidemic (that killed 12,000 people including many children) and the Obama admin people never replenished the stockpile. We didn’t shut the country down then, and the death toll from that was 10x worse than CV19 (so far, anyway, it could get worse).
Then the CDC screwed up the testing protocols because they had one bad reagent out of 3 used. Took them 2 more weeks then they ultimately they just told everyone to ignore that reagent and rely on the other 2. And so much more.
And all of this is the fault of the CDC and FDA regulations that went into effect after 2009. They were embarrassed and wanted to look like they were “doing something” to fix the 2009 errors, but all they ended up doing was make it next to impossible to do anything at all. They stripped all the states and private labs of the ability to run their own novel testing techniques, using their own equipment and their own reagents and methods, or look for their own unique disease markers. So stupid. There is so much capacity, energy, and brain power in this country. We have thousands of private labs that do blood tests 1000’s of times a day. But none of them were allowed to develop their own methods, or use different reagents etc. It all had to go through the federal sites and that command control style of government flat inhibits innovation and creativity and progress. They think they are the experts at everything and think the rest of the country are ignoramuses when the truth is the rest of the country is smart and productive and drives all innovation. None of these drugs or test were developed by the government agencies. None of them! But they want to control how, when, why, and where to use them. It’s asinine.
And the media needs to figure it out. Federal bureaucracies are worse, not better, than the marketplace of ideas. Or like Reagan said, government is the problem not the solution. Trump should be applauded for closing down travel from Asia, and for opening up testing to states and private labs, and for leaning on the FDA to loosen the use of various promising drugs.
Why the CDC botched its coronavirus testing
The first testing kits from the Centers for Disease Control had a simple fault, and red tape prevented other labs from creating their own.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615323/why-the-cdc-botched-its-coronavirus-testing/
MIT Technology Review article.