Posted on 04/03/2020 6:53:41 PM PDT by Hojczyk
On a Jan. 15 conference call, a leading scientist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assured local and state public health officials from across the nation that there would soon be a test to detect a mysterious virus spreading from China. Stephen Lindstrom told them the threat was remote and they may not need the test his team was developing "unless the scope gets much larger than we anticipate," according to an email summarizing the call. "We're in good hands," a public health official who participated in the call wrote in the email to colleagues.
Three weeks later, early on Feb. 8, one of the first CDC test kits arrived in a Federal Express package at a public health laboratory on the east side of Manhattan.
In the 21 days that followed, as Trump administration officials continued to rely on the flawed CDC test, many lab scientists eager to aid the faltering effort grew increasingly alarmed and exasperated by the federal government's actions, according to previously unreported email messages and other documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as exclusive interviews with scientists and officials involved. In their private communications, scientists at academic, hospital and public health labs - one layer removed from federal agency operations - expressed dismay at the failure to move more quickly and frustration at bureaucratic demands that delayed their attempts to develop alternatives to the CDC test.
The administration embraced a new approach behind closed doors that very day, concluding that "a much broader" effort to testing was needed, according to an internal government memo spelling out the plan. Two days later, the administration announced a relaxation of the regulations that scientists said had hindered private laboratories from deploying their own tests.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
A long article...looks like the CDC and FDA are the ones that will put the U.S. in a depression.....
Trump better open the economy soon or it will be all over..
worth reading
true. saw this first hand.
But is it fast and cheap?
Garbage originally from the W ComPost.
What other tests were available at that time?
The South Korea and WHO/German test was already available.
But the CDC fell into “not invented here”, banned everyone else from doing testing without written permission for every test until Feb 29. The CDC created a single point of failure. And then the CDC test failed.
Trump appointed that CDC goof with a beard and no moustache and Trump needs to fire him as soon as this is over.
You're saying those sources had large volumes of tests available then to distribute throughout America?
The lesson for the future is that in a pandemic there are two radically different rates of change that are competing. The rate of learning and change for government agencies is always a linear function with a fairly shallow slope that depends on the inertia and efficiency of the number of agencies involved.
The rate of spread of a disease is always a power function with an exponential slope that depends on its transmissibility and the number of hosts it can reach. In any race between these two curves the power function will win unless the linear function slope can be increased to nearly vertical (fast changes). Underestimating the overwhelming potential of a power function process like virus spread was the first mistake.
It always looks like you have things “under control” until the last few doublings when it overwhelms you.
The German and South Korean tests had low sensitivity and low specificity. That means they missed too many true positives and found too many false negatives to meet FDA standards.
Thanks!
I was also wondering how anyone could have produced any significant quantity of tests at that point. Other than perhaps China. Is that where the WHO got tests? The Covid-19 contaminated tests?
Non CDC labs throughout the USA were ready and actually did develop their own tests, some based on WHO, some not
The CDC got into a combination of “not invested here” as well as bureaucratic power/control play and caused the testing fiasco.
I thought we were talking about “South Korea and WHO/German test was already available.” The article you posted is dated March 13th so that’s not really applicable to the question of test availability in late Jan. and early Feb.
Not just CDC at fault. Article notes how FDA created a dizzying bureaucratic maze for labs seeking FDA approval of the tests they developed.
It’s a retrospective of what went wrong with the testing. S Korea was testing plenty in Feb. USA, almost none.
This was a FDA CDC bureaucratic failure. The great bureaucratic professionals that we are all supposed to defer to failued disastrously.
I know that none of what we do or say here on FRee Republic does a bit of good but neither does writing congress. It really only serves as some kind of outlet for frustration. I am outraged at the gooberment response to this pandemic. It has been a cluster flop and fraught with errors and incompetence. I am also scared for our future health wise and economically.
FDA and CDC screwed around for two months without progress. Only on Feb 29 did they BEGIN to remove roadblocks to testing processes developed outside the gooberment.
No real progress on testing was made until starting on March 12 when Admiral Brett Giroir was appointed to sort the CDC and FDA mess out. Testing only really began nearly two weeks later. By then it was too late to do much good.
The results of this gross incompetence and arrogance by CDC and FDA are tragic in lives and livelihoods.
People in CDC and FDA should be exterminated. Justifiably by the disease they have aided in devastating the nation.
Arrogant bastard bureaucrats. Start the punishment with these:
Lindstrom of CDC
Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the FDA
Some of the 22,000 gooberment hogs at CDC
Daniel Jernigan, CDC, “Is this something to worry about?”
Timothy Stenzel, FDA
The gooberment has been caught flat footed. The agencies that were supposed to be working and vigilant to protect us were screwing around with unimportant things. Being Social Justice Warriors.
yup. Plenty of bureaucratic failure all around.
To be fair, S. Korea had a lot of cases in Feb. and the U.S. had almost none.
The WHO and SK test are basically “recipes” and any commercial lab manufacturer could have produced them.
“Cheap” is very relative these days...but fast seems to be a quality...ironic...
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