Via The Washington Post: Inside the coronavirus testing failure. Excerpt:
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.
“We’re 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 government’s 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 government’s 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.
In their private communications, scientists at academic, hospital and public health labs — one layer removed from federal agency operations — expressed dismay at the failure to move more quickly and frustration at bureaucratic demands that delayed their attempts to develop alternatives to the CDC test.
“We have the skills and resources as a community but we are collectively paralyzed by a bloated bureaucratic/administrative process,” Marc Couturier, medical director at academic laboratory ARUP in Utah, wrote to other microbiologists on Feb. 27 after weeks of mounting frustration.
The administration embraced a new approach behind closed doors that very day, concluding that “a much broader” effort to testing was needed, according to an internal government memo spelling out the plan. Two days later, the administration announced a relaxation of the regulations that scientists said had hindered private laboratories from deploying their own tests.
By then, the virus had spread across the country. In less than a month, it would upend daily life, shuttering the world’s largest economy and killing thousands of Americans.
In a statement to The Post, the CDC said an investigation of the initial problems is ongoing. The test is now in use in every state and is “accurate and reliable,” the agency said.
Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates testing, told The Post the agency is continuously adapting to an “unprecedented global public health crisis."
“Right now, our efforts are focused on doing everything we can do to fight COVID-19, but we know there will certainly be a time to learn larger lessons from the agency’s response,” he said in a statement, referring to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
In an interview Thursday, Brett P. Giroir, a Public Health Service admiral who on March 12 was named the top administration official on the testing effort, acknowledged the government should have moved more decisively to detect and contain the virus.
“There was a clear need for a more aggressive posture,” said Giroir, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, adding that agency leaders named him to the new role because “unprecedented steps needed to take place.”
Asked who was responsible for the delays in the early stages of the crisis, he paused.
“A problem like this is bigger than any single agency,” he said. “Clearly, there needed to be a higher level of leadership and organization.”
