During his press conference, Donald Trump claimed the WHO tests were not up to FDA standards, choosing instead to develop our own. Dr. Joseph Fair confirms the exact opposite is the case.
“The reason WHO didn’t offer us the test is because they only offered them for free to impoverished nations,” Dr. Fair explained on MSNBC. “We have to buy them.”
Turning to the question of flawed tests, Dr. Fair said, “The tests that were out that were inaccurate were — false positives and false negatives — were actually the CDC tests, not the commercial tests.”
“So that’s the opposite of what happened,” he concluded.
That is backed up by this report from the Washington Post
Founder of a small Berlin-based company, the ponytailed 54-year-old first raced to help German researchers come up with a diagnostic test and then spurred his company to produce and ship more than 1.4 million tests by the end of February for the World Health Organization.
“My wife and I have been working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, ever since,” Landt said by phone about 1 a.m. Friday, Berlin time. “Our days are full.”
By contrast, over the same critical period, U.S. efforts to distribute tests ground nearly to a halt, and the country’s inability to produce them left public health officials with limited means to determine where and how fast the virus was spreading. From mid-January until Feb. 28, fewer than 4,000 tests from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were used out of more 160,000 produced.
The reason the CDC tests weren’t used? Because they DID NOT WORK.
Here are the quotes from the health officials on the issue at the press conference this morning:
Officials have acknowledged that there are still not enough tests to meet demand, but on Tuesday they pushed back on criticism that the administration rejected a test from the World Health Organization that could have been used to save time until the U.S. developed its own test.
“No one ever offered a test that we refused,” said Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. “This was a research-grade test that was not approved, not submitted to the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] … there was a small number that we have greatly surpassed in a very short period of time.”
The CDC decided to create its own test, instead of using the one developed by the WHO.
The WHO test, which adopted a German test as its model, was developed soon after Chinese researchers publicly posted the genome of the coronavirus in January. It shipped millions of tests to countries around the world, but generally only those without the capability to develop their own.
The U.S. developed its own test around the same time, but manufacturing and quality control issues soon set it well behind the WHO.
CDC officials acknowledged that one of the three components of the initial test were faulty, but it took weeks before the agency approved a workaround.
Public health experts and some governors have also said bureaucratic red tape around approvals slowed the development of new tests in the U.S.
Administration health officials have been loosening regulations, and on Monday night the FDA said it would allow states to take responsibility for tests developed and used by laboratories in their states, without involving the federal government.
Deborah Birx, a State Department official coordinating the White House coronavirus task force, told reporters that the testing delays were due to the rigorous scientific process involved in approving U.S. diagnostic tests.
“We were adamant about having a high quality test based on our commercial vendors,” Birx said. “Over the next few months you’ll begin to see that other tests that were utilized around the world were not of the same quality, resulting in false positives and potentially false negatives.”
President Trump then doubled down on the defense.
“So number one, nothing was offered, number two, it was a bad test. Otherwise, it was wonderful,” Trump said.
Last week, one of my Salon columns was about Trump’s task force, including Deborah Birx who came out and degraded her credibility even more than she already had by making this claim about the WHO tests this morning. She is part of the conservative evangelical cabal around Mike Pence in the White House. She may be a thoroughly qualified immunologist but she seems to be a Trumpie as well. After today I’m going to have a very hard time trusting anything she has to say.