Quote:
Originally Posted by calgirlinnc
This is untrue.
The World Health Organization did not offer the US any testing kits.
“No discussions occurred between WHO and CDC about WHO providing COVID-19 tests to the United States,” said WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris. “This is consistent with experience since the United States does not ordinarily rely on WHO for reagents or diagnostic tests because of sufficient domestic capacity.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/khn.org...r-offered/amp/ |
You're partially right Calgirl
"Aid groups, such as the Pan American Health Organization, took that model and built their training and supplies around it. If the model was like the recipe in a cookbook, the supplies were the ingredients in a home meal kit from Blue Apron.
Any country could use whatever recipe it preferred, and even if the United States had picked the WHO’s protocol, it wouldn’t need the WHO to sell it the materials to follow it. Germany released its protocol on Jan. 17, but the U.S. decided to have the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention develop its own. That protocol was published Jan. 28.
In this instance, this caused a lag in testing for the virus in the U.S.
The CDC’s test was different and more complicated than the German test. It worked in the CDC lab, but when the materials went out to state labs, some of them got inconsistent results. The CDC had to resend packages with new chemical reagents.
State laboratories started developing their own tests and were ready to use them, but had to wait for emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration. All of this added up to a delay in testing capabilities which resulted in fewer Americans being tested and an overall slower U.S. response compared to other countries.
When asked to respond to Biden’s claim, the Trump campaign pointed to multiple news stories that said it's not uncommon for the U.S. and other countries to develop their own tests during outbreaks, and that the CDC did so during Ebola and Zika outbreaks. The campaign also said the CDC's test had a quick turnaround compared to other diagnostic tests like MERS and Zika that took months to develop. And the issue with the CDC’s protocol was not the test itself, but rather a manufacturing defect, the campaign added.
That’s not how it works
While it might seem odd that the Trump administration shunned the WHO’s coronavirus test protocol, it’s normal for countries with advanced research capabilities to want to develop a measure that they trust.
"I don’t know if WHO agreed to sell the kits to us, but it should never have been something we needed to do given our technological expertise and the fact we would have ‘taken kits from low- and middle-income countries’ that otherwise could not make or afford them," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, in an email.
It’s also unlikely, Mores said, that the WHO offered to sell kits to the U.S., because that’s not normally what the organization does.
"In my experience, this is never something that I would have to purchase," he said.
Typically, Mores said, American labs have all of the basic ingredients and equipment to run the test — all that would be needed is the viral sequences and an exact test protocol. The only catch at the moment is that supplies of those basic ingredients are stretched thin due to high demand."
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