In early February 2020, Kirsten St. George and her team at New York state's public health lab received a test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to diagnose people infected with the new, rapidly spreading coronavirus.
But, like many labs around the country, it quickly found the test gave inaccurate results. So test samples had to be sent back to the CDC for processing, wasting time and leaving state officials "sort of blind to what the situation was with the disease," said St. George, chief of the laboratory of viral diseases at the Wadsworth Center, one of the nation's largest state public health labs.
The CDC says it's working to address its liabilities, using the findings of that advisory committee as a guide. It's a big job — one further complicated by new leadership at the agency, constrained resources, and continued antagonism and threatened budget cuts from members of Congress. The work group that later performed an independent postmortem on the development of the test, using information provided by the CDC, came to the same conclusions.
A few short weeks after the flawed tests were released, life across the U.S. would grind to a halt, with officials resorting to mass lockdowns to slow the spread of the virus that has killed more than 1.1 million Americans. "Improvements to further strengthen CDC's labs are well underway," said CDC spokesperson Kevin Griffis. "Reforms will continue to move ahead at full speed."
"You can’t get one bolus of money, and then say, 'OK, now that solves it till the end of time,'" he said. "The things that we’re talking about are things that we have to sustain." In addition, research and clinical work would happen in the same lab space, which made it hard to ensure quality standards for test development and "very easy to cut corners," Taylor said.
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