The CDC’s single biggest breakdown in its response to COVID was the abortive rollout of its COVID test. In their defense, officials at the CDC pointed out to me that developing tests for commercial and academic labs was never their job. It wasn’t what they had ever done before. Their experience was in working directly with state public health labs. They had done it successfully in 2009 in response to H1N1 swine flu. But once the agency ran into challenges with their development of that initial test for SARS-CoV-2, for weeks after, there still wasn’t another test being pursued in the US other
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