The criticisms of the administration are very relevant and valid. The response has been terrible and it’s going to cost lives. The response probably would have been underwhelming with any administration as it just seems like we were woefully unprepared on all levels. Certainly didn’t help that this one closed up the NSC’s pandemic response office though. DEFINITELY didn’t help that they initially downplayed this as the sniffles. It’s literally going to cost people lives.
Who could have seen something like this coming (except for every epidemiologist on the planet)????
Hopefully every ensuing administration learns valuable lessons from the present times and are more prepared for these events going forward. I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ll see of something like this is my lifetime
I saw a lot of misinformation, and clearly politically biased posts in the last thread. People saying the CDC was late to react, and refused the WHO tests, and blaming certain people in the government. These people need the facts.
The first whole genome sequence was not published until Jan 11. Primer sets had been previously made available, but did not contain the entire genome. The CDC had its first test by Jan 24th. Hardly late to react. The public health emergency was declared on Jan 31st, which is when the problem with the tests became apparent. The problem with the test was with one of the control reagents (which helps to rule out false positives), because of quality control at the third party lab who created that reagent.
Now why didn't the CDC just use the WHO tests (created by the German counterpart to our CDC)? And why weren't state labs allowed to be working on testing in parallel with the CDC? In both cases, there are (or were) FDA regulations that prohibited it. If you want to blame the government, fine, but blame the right part of the government.