I found a lot of interesting snippets of information in this Washington Post article by Peter Whoriskey and Neena Satija. For example:
The United States’ struggles, in Landt’s view, stemmed from the fact the country took too long to use private companies to develop the tests. The coronavirus pandemic was too big and moving too fast for the CDC to develop its own tests in time, he said.
Landt, a German biomed entrepeneur quoted in the piece, thinks that the CDC’s desire to control the process has actually impaired our ability to produce effective tests quickly enough. That’s supported by this:
It has been long-standing practice for CDC scientists in emergencies to develop the first diagnostic tests, in part because the CDC has access to samples of the virus before others, officials said. Later, private companies that win FDA authorization can scale up efforts to meet demand.
You might find this darkly amusing:
Shortly after publication of the virus’s genome in early January, German researchers announced they had designed a diagnostic test. Then, within days, scientists at the CDC said they’d developed one, too, and even used it detect the first U.S. case.
Or this:
In fact, the U.S. efforts to distribute a working test stalled until Feb. 28, when federal officials revised the CDC test and began loosening up FDA rules that had limited who could develop coronavirus diagnostic tests.
And I found this particularly interesting:
On March 7, FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn stressed the importance of quality, noting that diagnostic tests in some other countries have been flawed. He did not specify which countries he meant, but China’s test may have produced lots of false positives, according to a recent publication by Chinese researchers.
A test which produces lots of false positives and lots of false negatives, as I presume was the problem with the CDC’s first test, is worse than useless.
To get the whole story you’ll need to read the whole thing.
I’ve already expressed my opinion that Donald Trump will undoubtedly be blamed whatever happens with the COVID-19 outbreak so my next comments should in no way be construed as a defense of Trump but anyone who blames Trump for the lack of tests is living in a dream world. The CDC has been in charge of the process, it’s a bureaucracy, and ordering a bureaucracy to do anything is like commanding the waves of the sea to recede. You can order individual researchers or teams of researchers to work hard or faster or cut corners but not a bureaucracy. That’s like holding a deep philosphical discussion with a dog.
All large organizations are either bureaucracies or autocracies or, frequently, both. We know of no other way of organizing them. That’s why all large organizations, public or private, are frequently so ineffectual. The problem is the whole system. That’s the complaint of Trump’s supporters. That’s what “drain the swamp” means.
The difference between my view and theirs is that I don’t believe that anyone who doesn’t understand the swamp can drain it other than by an Alexandrian cutting of the knot and that has implications as bad or worse than an impeding bureaucracy and I don’t think that Trump is the guy to do it.
Several of my earlier posts dealt with how bureaucratic policies of the FDA & CDC have stymied a quicker production and release of Coronavirus test kits. There are also reasons to believe the rigid controls exercised by these departments became more entrenched during the past administration. Nonetheless, it was not until those red tape policies were set aside, in late February, that private sector innovation and skill sets could freely flow, used to better assist in virus identification diagnostics.
The nuts and bolts, though, of this virus saga has continually been obscured by political gaming, mainly employed by the opposition party. Their misguided vigor, unfortunately, seems poisoned by a toxicity of hatred felt for the current POTUS, so much so, that their line of sight seems to be aimed no higher than denigrating one man. In fact, I will take this a step further, questioning the actual validity behind the extreme rhetoric and subsequent measures put into place to address the spread of this virus. IMO, panic and fear do not partner well with reasoned analysis, public calm, and accurately vetted facts in reaching an appropriate, proportionally designed course of action, going forward. The current volatile climate, however, embraces none of the above. Instead, dialing up emotional volume, partisan finger-pointing, exploiting misinformation in order to erode confidence in the WH, and putting the economy in a response tourniquet, tying off commerce and immobilizing the lives of citizens, seems to be the primary tools reached for by a partisan press and those stuck in never-ending opposition mode.
May have said this earlier on this blog; give a job to an elephant and you get an elephantine response. Why should anybody be surprised? In addition the continued employment of the workers at the CDC doesn’t depend upon success; it depends upon not f**king up so badly that you make the organization look bad. Not a good combination in a situation when speed AND efficacy are paramount.
One common aspect of poor management is poor follow through. Good leadership does not just assign a task and hope it gets done. There should have been someone, maybe a pandemic response team, monitoring every step and once it was clear in a week of two that we didnt have working test they should’ve been looking for alternatives. So, again, today I am on may email chains all bemoaning the lack of tests and to whom we will ration them.
The CDC did oK under different management. But it is a big organization. They are not always that good at being fast. They are really good at in depth research. They need careful management when you need fast.
” That’s what “drain the swamp†means.”
Nope. It just means get rid of the Democrats. Look at how they behave.
Steve
“There should have been someone, maybe a pandemic response team, monitoring every step and once it was clear in a week of two that we didnt have working test they should’ve been looking for alternatives.”
There was and is a pandemic team in place. because the old one was consolidated into a bigger one, and not simply dispensed with as you routinely assert. Alternatives could only be dealt with once the old FDA and CDC rules had been put aside.
No, The White House Didn’t Dissolve It’s Pandemic Response Office
As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.†That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.
One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.
“The CDC did oK under different management”
And, under this new management, with suddenly an entirely “new” virus, having a new scope of contagion, severity, and genetic sequencing to understand and prepare for, the WH task force assembled seems to be checking all the right boxes.
A test which produces lots of false positives and lots of false negatives, as I presume was the problem with the CDC’s first test, is worse than useless.
From what I understand it wasn’t that but the fact that the tests couldn’t even produce a result at all. The reagents were contaminated so that the negative controls on the tests turned up positive.