Fed Investigation: CDC SPREAD the COVID-19 virus themselves
As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.
The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.
The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.
Now, according to investigation results reported by The New York Times, federal officials confirm that sloppy laboratory practices at two of three CDC labs involved in the tests’ creation led to contamination of the tests and their uninterpretable results.
“Just tragic”
Shortly after the problems became apparent in early February, the Food and Drug Administration sent Timothy Stenzel, chief of in vitro diagnostics and radiological health, to the CDC to investigate what was going wrong. According to the Times, he found a lack of coordination and inexperience in commercial manufacturing.
Problems that led to the contamination included researchers coming and going from labs working on the test kits without changing their coats and researchers sharing lab space to both assemble test components and handle samples containing the coronavirus.
The CDC said in a statement Saturday to the Times that the agency “did not manufacture its test consistent with its own protocol.” Though the CDC appeared reluctant to admit contamination was at the root of the problem, the Times noted that in a separate statement the CDC seemed to acknowledge such problems, saying the agency has since “implemented enhanced quality control to address the issue and will be assessing the issue moving forward.”
After the CDC first sent its test kit to states in early February, it took the agency around a month to fix the problem. By then, the virus had invaded many communities unimpeded, and any chance that the US had at containing its spread had virtually vanished. By mid-March, many states turned to mitigation efforts, such as social distancing, to try to blunt—rather than prevent—the life-threatening, healthcare-overwhelming effects of COVID-19.
“It was just tragic,” Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told the Times. “All that time when we were sitting there waiting, I really felt like, here we were at one of the most critical junctures in public health history, and the biggest tool in our toolbox was missing.”
As of the morning of April 20, the US has confirmed more than 760,000 cases of COVID-19 and more than 40,700 deaths. The numbers are expected to be underestimates due to the slow and still limited amount of testing.
Read more at arstechnica.com
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Tom O
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How damn bogus this headline is. So what if the kits couldn’t tell if the person being tested did or did not have the virus, it still is not SPREADING the virus. It’s the same crappy, “fake news” that I have grown to hate, just from the other side. There is a huge difference between what is implied by this headline and what happened, and if you don’t see that, you are part of the problem.
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Dean Q
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Apparently, you didn’t read the article, Tom. It clearly says the test kits were contaminated WITH Covid. That means when you use the test kit, the test kit GIVES you the virus. That is also known as spreading the virus. It wasn’t just that the results were in error; it was that the tests were contaminated. I doubt they will ever admit how many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people, got this virus due to initial transmission via the kit itself.
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Ddwieland
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But “spreading the virus” would normally be understood as spreading within the population, which is apparently not what the faulty test kits did. Therefore I agree with Tom O’s disdain for the headline.
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Finn McCool
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Oh come on, Tom O.
Your point was self-evident. Look at where the article was sourced from:
ars technica. com
I had to look. They have an orange circle that proudly proclaims ‘ars’ in the website heading.
It reminded me of that apocryphal story of the City University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
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Shirley A. Bennett
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Clearly I think the previous poster misread the article. I read the article and it does state that the tests were contaminated with the virus. Read paragraph 6 and then read paragraph 8. The tests were contaminated with the virus. This isn’t “fake” news. The act of using the “test” kits from the CDC was in fact infecting those people being tested.
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Ddwieland
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The article states that the tests couldn’t be interpreted, not that they infected anyone.
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Herb Rose
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Tom is correct that the title is misleading. The article states that one of the reagents was contaminated making the tests useless. When doing such a test the reagent should not contact anything except the sample being tested so it would not give anyone the virus. The article contends by not having the ability to accurately do testing the virus was able to spread further not that the tests caused people to contract the virus.
The same comment is true for the title of the article Nobel Scientist: COVID-19 is a man made bio weapon. Not true. The article says it was developed trying to create a vaccine for HIV, not a bio weapon.
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Joseph Olson
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“China Comes Clean, US-Aid PREDICT Bioweapon Contract” by George Webb, YT
Fauci signed $3.7 million corona deal in 2017
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judy
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This type of analysis feeds the socialist alarmist’s agenda .The fact is that when you calculate that alarming! 40,700 out of the whole USA population over 300,000,000 % deaths come to 0.012, a truly minuscule amount.
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