The CDC was also exerting its intellectual property rights over its test design. If labs wanted to develop their own tests, they would need to copy the CDC’s design, which the agency said was proprietary. Negotiating a right of reference to the CDC’s recipe added additional complexities and delays, especially for the commercial manufacturers that wanted to be able to market kits to laboratories. Taken together, these layers of obstacles and intricacies froze out of the market solutions that could have filled some of the void left by the CDC’s own stumbles.
