Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Did Obama-Era CDC Bureaucrats Botch The Coronavirus Testing Response?

By now, it's become abundantly clear that the federal government's sluggishness in distributing functioning tests to labs around the country is one reason why governors and big-city mayors across the country are closing schools and businesses in preparation for a de facto 2 week quarantine.
The government seemingly had the whole month of February to distribute tests, which it should have been receiving from the WHO, which had contracted with a small Germany biotech firm to to produce millions of tests.
Instead, the CDC had only distributed a few thousand tests at the end of last month, and seems to have only taken steps to fix the problem over the last week, after a hail of criticism from doctors and experts as thousands of patients complained they didn't have access to tests.
LINK: The CDC was Fighting Racism and Obesity 
Instead of Stopping Epidemics
Well, the left-wing press has been carrying out a campaign to place the blame for the agency's failures squarely on the shoulders of President Trump, with the Washington Post lambasting him for closing a pandemic preparedness office set up by President Obama to combat Ebola - even as the official charged with dissolving the office, writing also in the Washington Post, that these charges are specious.
At any rate, we've noticed that these claims have largely been circulated by former Obama-era CDC officials, who have leapt at every chance to criticize the administration's overall response, along with the 'botched' testing rollout, on cable news.
But in an investigative piece overnight, the Washington Post laid out how the CDC, acting mostly independently of the administration and in keeping with the precedent for epidemic response, strung the White House along by claiming to ramp up testing while many of the tests were defective. But even as some labs figured out how to fix the defects, and others carried out testing on their own, the CDC remained inexplicably inflexible until suddenly admitting that it had been wrong, then promising to do better, once the demand for tests hit a critical apex.
Read the rest of the story HERE.

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