Posted on 04/19/2020 4:47:00 AM PDT by rintintin
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.
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.
n 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
CDC really fu&&*ed up.
Budget cuts and layoffs are needed.
Why is all of the US dependent on one lab? We need some back up. We needed an alternative.
And if they can’t even keep their own labs sterile...
Wanna keep the public sector eggheads, fine.
But then make them duel it out with the private sector's eggheads.
And may the best brainiacs and, more importantly, the taxpayers win.
The CDC has been politicized by the Left for decades.
A prime objective of the CDC has been to push gun control.
Move the CDC to Nebraska where they have the bio containment hospital and leave the incompetents behind.
NYT tried to debunk “we inherited a broken system” and came up short
“Why is all of the US dependent on one lab? We need some back up. We needed an alternative.”
Yeah.
It’s one lab that wastes a lot of time on gun-control and global warming.
In other words, Trump”s fault.
I wish Trump would call out the CDC. So far he’s been way too supportive of the health bureaucracies, even though they didn’t protect us from the Chinese virus. Birx and Fauci are in the middle of those bureaucracies, and he still has them right by his side, even though they told us 2.5 million would die
What have you got against Nebraska?
If they are going to screw-up and let some plague escape from their labs I’d rather it be in D.C. than in Omaha.
Let it loose in DC and the pols will do what they did this time: Run away.
Fricking cowards.
The result of diversity and affirmative action.
First gen testing.. I tried to tell folks.. but they just want a test now.. whether it is accurate or not. It will be a couple of years before a truly accurate test is available without interfering substance with acceptable sensitivities and specificities. .
They need to hire more ‘experts’.
I was surprised they investigated and published this story. It was a rare moment of journalism instead of agitprop.
“He found an astonishing lack of expertise in commercial manufacturing and learned that nobody was in charge of the entire process, they said.”
In other words is the usual FedGov f******.
When this thing is over fully 80% of it needs to be gutted like a fish.
L
Yup. My grandfather used to manage a county government agency. He used to have to staff it with political hacks and Affirmative Action hires. Trying to get actual work done caused him to pull out what was left of his hair.
“This is Ward Chairman Wisnewski’s drunken brother-in-law. He works for you now.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/12/science/cdc-closes-anthrax-and-flu-labs-after-accidents.html
C.D.C. Closes Anthrax and Flu Labs After Accidents
By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
July 11, 2014
After potentially serious back-to-back laboratory accidents, federal health officials announced Friday that they had temporarily closed the flu and anthrax laboratories at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’s highest-security labs.
The accidents, and the C.D.C.’s emphatic response to them, could have important consequences for the many laboratories that store high-risk agents and the few that, even more controversially, specialize in making them more dangerous for research purposes.
If the C.D.C. — which the agency’s director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, called “the reference laboratory to the world” — had multiple accidents that could, in theory, have killed both staff members and people outside, there will undoubtedly be calls for stricter controls on other university, military and private laboratories.
In one episode last month, at least 62 C.D.C. employees may have been exposed to live anthrax bacteria after potentially infectious samples were sent to laboratories unequipped to handle them. Employees not wearing protective gear worked with bacteria that were supposed to have been killed but may not have been. All were offered a vaccine and antibiotics, and the agency said it believed no one was in danger.
(snip)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/01/04/cdc-secret-lab-incidents-select-agents/95972126/
CDC keeps secret its mishaps with deadly germs
Jan. 4, 2017
[Incidents at labs in Atlanta and Fort Collins, Colo., 2013 - early 2015.]
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