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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsInside the coronavirus testing failure: Alarm and dismay among the scientists who sought to help
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.
Were 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. By then, the virus had reached the United States, and the kits represented the governments best hope for containing it while that was still possible.
For hours, lab technicians struggled to verify that the test worked. Each time, it fell short, producing untrustworthy results.
That night, they called their lab director, Jennifer Rakeman, an assistant commissioner in the New York City health department, to tell her it had failed. Oh, s---, she replied. What are we going to do now?
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 governments 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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/03/coronavirus-cdc-test-kits-public-health-labs/?arc404=true
This administration is a walking disaster.
lindysalsagal
(20,692 posts)Damn. It looks like several hours of reading.
I think the bottom line is that the regular bureaucracies couldn't find anyone high enough on the food chain to allow them to but through the red tape.
BComplex
(8,053 posts)Can't do that right now.
Pobeka
(4,999 posts)Works fine for me...
crickets
(25,981 posts)Bookmarking to read tomorrow morning.