Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb

But on February 6 came another red flag. A final quality check showed that the test kit could fail 33 percent of the time. For reasons that have not been fully explained, the CDC decided to ship the kits anyway.5 They were initially sent to labs in thirty-three states.6 On the same day, the World Health Organization directed the shipment of about 250,000 COVID test kits (manufactured by a German firm) to more than 70 labs around the world.7 Once the public health labs got the CDC kits, they first tried to validate them by testing sterile water, a common practice to confirm whether a test kit worked. Sterile water should have generated a negative result since it contains no coronavirus RNA. The labs were distraught to discover the samples testing positive as if the water contained live virus.8 This was not an isolated problem, either. Twenty-four of the first twenty-six labs that tried to run the tests couldn’t get it to work. Nobody knew why.