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

by Scott Gottlieb

While this was going on, one of the CDC’s contract manufacturers, Integrated DNA Technologies, Inc., or IDT as it was known, decided to start making its own primer and probe kits using the blueprints that the CDC had already published on January 27. This was the key component that labs needed in order to assemble their own test kits and no longer have to rely on the CDC. Initially, IDT began accepting orders for a version of that panel that could be used for research use only, and not for testing and reporting results to patients.15 However, using the primers and probes, sophisticated labs could now assemble their own tests using the CDC’s original protocol. And IDT had made a reliable set of these components that could be mass-produced. With the IDT kits, labs would now have all of the components they needed to start testing patient samples.