The CDC did not fail. Politicalizing the issues of the directives by the CDC is what failed. The CDC are the people equipped with the data and the science to make the critical decisions.
Exactly ....ONE of their failures and not one anyone could foresee or say it was “their fault,” But a concept failure none the less because there is not sufficient protection for them from existing laws that would prohibit political interference. And that needs fixing in the future. I said so as much in an earlier post you are probably not aware of.
But the CDC DID FAIL, in a catastrophic fashion, when it came to our initial testing at the most critical time of this entire situation...initial outbreak.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and even the Wall Street Journal have detailed the initial failures in decision making which led to almost 6 weeks of confusion and lack of any quantity of testing in the United States. I always like to verify with an outside source what I’m reading in the media...if I can...and in this particular instance I have a retired scientist cousin, a virologist, who was a subcontractor for NIH and the CDC on several different occasions. In fact, his last major work was on the ebola vaccine. I asked him to take a look at the articles from a scientist’s point of view. He is still very active in that overall community and wrote me back saying that the articles pretty much hit the nail on the head. Some woeful decision making took place....possibly some scientific hubris.
The bottom line is that the United States knew that the disease was coming and had a workable solution for a test that could be produced fairly quickly. A team at the CDC felt that the test could be “improved on” with the addition of another element which would not only identify a coronavirus positive but if it was not Coronavirus, would give evidence of what the individual was really suffering from. This additional element increased the cost and increased the amount of time that it would take to produce the tests but because they thought they could accomplish it within time and that it would give valuable information they went ahead anyway. There was much discussion within the CDC whether this was a proper procedure and whether the United States should just stick with a known test procedure that works.The chief of that department convinced leadership that it could be accomplished easily and not that big of a risk.
This led to a smaller amount of testing materials initially available and the situation was exacerbated when it was discovered that it was this new “additional element” that was causing far too many of the failures of the CDC provided test. It was even discovered (by the University of Nebraska medical center if I’m not mistaken) that if that additional element was removed from the test, The CDC test then performed within standards. All the while this information was being forwarded to the CDC and an almost 2 week delay occurred before the CDC would allow the removal of the additional element in order to conduct a viable test. Then it was discovered that there were problems with contamination dealing with the CDC lab that was producing this already smaller number of tests. The final problem added on top of all of this was the fact that the CDC decided to produce all tests within its own lab facilities which are fairly robust, but at the same time one has to wonder how they thought they could produce enough tests for 328 million Americans.
The bottom line was a catastrophic failure of initial testing that can be solely pinned on the CDC. Was it mistakes in judgment? Scientific hubris? A series of unfortunate events? Lack of leadership and controls over that department making such huge and risky decisions? Probably a combination of all of this but in the end does it matter. The CDC failed in this particular, highly critical area, and we need to make efforts to prevent it from ever happening again.
I’m not part of the problem my friend, I am advocating for solutions to the problems that have appeared in this pandemic.
Perhaps you misunderstand me.
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