Res Ipsa wrote:Because there was nothing suspicious or unusual about one of the wealthiest countries in the world producing its own test kits instead of mooching off the WHO, which supports dozens of poor countries that lack the expertise and infrastructure that we have.
Are you kidding me? I guess the joke is on us then as all these other countries managed to address the problem with haste.
Res Ipsa wrote:Having the CDC produce the initial test kits and ship them to the states is SOP.
And yet they were ill prepared to do so, and with the W.H.O already equipped with the necessary testing we should have accepted it for the sake of curbing a pandemic as much as possible. National pride about being rich with money, expertise and infracture should take a back seat to common sense that saves lives.
Res Ipsa wrote: There were significant mistakes that should be investigated and learned from. But this was not one of them.
You're the first person I've seen say this. Everyone else seems to admit the mistake or those in the Trump administration refuse to offer an explanation at all.
Res Ipsa wrote: It’s hard enough to get reliable information without folks slinging around conspiracy theory.
What conspiracy theory? That the Trump administration made a stupid mistake on this point, being perfectly consistent with its standard M.O.?
That article doesn't discuss anything about why we rejected the the WHO's testing.
The United States badly bungled coronavirus testing—but things may soon improveSpeed is critical in the response to COVID-19. So why has the United States been so slow in its attempt to develop reliable diagnostic tests and use them widely?
The World Health Organization (WHO) has shipped testing kits to 57 countries. China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week; South Korea has tested 65,000 people so far. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in contrast, has done only 459 tests since the epidemic began. The rollout of a CDC-designed test kit to state and local labs has become a fiasco because it contained a faulty reagent. Labs around the country eager to test more suspected cases—and test them faster—have been unable to do so. No commercial or state labs have the approval to use their own tests.
In what is already an infamous snafu, CDC initially refused a request to test a patient in Northern California who turned out to be the first probable COVID19 case without known links to an infected person.
Key Missteps at the CDC Have Set Back Its Ability to Detect the Potential Spread of CoronavirusAs the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test.
The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.
What went wrong with the coronavirus tests in the U.S.In late December, when reports of a new virus causing mysterious pneumonia began to trickle out of Wuhan, China, public health experts went on high alert. One of the first needs was to develop a test so that governments across the world would have the ability to track the spread of the virus.
China developed its own test. Leading laboratories in Germany published their own version, which was adopted by the World Health Organization. Many countries, including the United States, developed their own tests.
The traditional U.S. strategy for devising new diagnostic tests starts with the CDC. That is supposed to ensure new tests are accurate and reliable, but it also meant that other parallel approaches were not aggressively pursued.
Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner in the Trump administration, said, “The key in a crisis like this is to take an all-of-the-above approach, whether we’re dealing with diagnostics or therapeutics.” That responsibility, he said, was up to other parts of the administration, such as the Department of Health and Human Services or the FDA.
"One of the hardest things for me to accept is the fact that Kevin Graham has blonde hair, blue eyes and an English last name. This ugly truth blows any arguments one might have for actual white supremacism out of the water. He's truly a disgrace." - Ajax
