RUSH: I want to read a headline to you. This headline is from one of my tech blogs, Ars Technica. Ready?
These are the best and the brightest. These are the experts. These are the people we cannot question. “[A] federal investigation found that CDC researchers were not following protocol and they released coronavirus tests that were actually tainted with the virus.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here are the sad details, folks. “As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed. The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and — because testing is crucial for containment efforts — it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.”
Well, you mean to tell me that the renowned experts, people who pontificate from on high and we can’t question, actually sent out coronavirus tests that were tainted with the virus? This story doesn’t even allude to the fact that maybe some people got the freaking thing from the tests or even the possibility of it?
“The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that ‘a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents’ had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control — that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.”
Look, I understand this focus on testing. I think antibodies are far more important ’cause you have to test everybody every day if you’re gonna rely on tests. Now, I understand they have some value. But like you could test me today and I could come up totally clear, what happens if next week I get the virus? What good is the test that they just ran on me the week before? That’d be true of anybody.
“Now, according to investigation results reported by The New York Times, federal officials confirm that sloppy laboratory practices at two of three CDC labs involved in the tests’ creation led to contamination of the tests and their uninterpretable results.
“Shortly after the problems became apparent in early February, the Food and Drug Administration sent Timothy Stenzel, chief of in vitro diagnostics and radiological health, to the CDC to investigate what was going wrong. According to the Times, he found a lack of coordination and inexperience in commercial manufacturing.”
The last I looked, Donald Trump has not been at the CDC. He was not there in early February conducting these tests. And the story says here it’s just tragic. Yes, it is.
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