This is the article I've been looking for. The history of Corona Virus failures in U.S.

[LAS14]

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing-failure-123166

One really bad decision is that the U.S. did not use the WHO test that was developed very early. Sixty other nations did.

Here's another bad decision I hadn't heard about. "The failures weren’t by any means the CDC’s alone. The FDA did not immediately trigger a regulatory workaround enabling qualified medical centers to roll out tests that they had designed themselves — tests that are now starting to become more widely available."

Unfortunately, the article is not able to tie bad decisions to specific people. I'm very eager to find out how much he Trump budget cuts and firings have affected what has happened re COVID-19.

Have any of you seen information about who the decision makers are?

tia
las

[pat_k]

1. Great link... "Why the United States declined to use the WHO test..."

I haven't seen anything identifying failures in process and the people directly involved, but I would love to see someone like Jane Mayer dig into this question... as well as subsequent failures.

Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.

On edit:
BTW, from a VOX article:

By 13 January – three days after the gene sequence was published – a reliable test was available, developed by scientists at the department of virology at Berlin’s Charité university hospital with help from experts in Rotterdam, London and Hong Kong.

This has been my list of questions:

Why did the CDC decide they needed to come up with "their own" rather than use the reliable test already developed? (An effort that took an additional 3 weeks.) What process/reasoning, went into this disastrous decision?

What failures in process allowed the "performance issues" to go undetected until AFTER they began distributing their test around Feb 3? (Problems identified by recipients, NOT the CDC.)

Why did most states have to continue to send their samples to CDC for an additional 4 weeks (through March 2), causing a "bottleneck"?

And why is it only in the last couple days that they appear to have recognized the urgency and begun to really "ramp up" testing capacity?

The FDA failure you cite is obviously a big part of the answer to the last question, but as you say, I'd like to know who the fuck ups are who are responsible for that failure. (Trumps population of regulatory agencies with incompetents is surely to blame, but which incompetents? The entire commission? Ignorance of the part of some lower level trump cronies? )

[5X]

2. all the decision makers were fired, dotard doesn't think he needs anyone else. n/t

[yonder]

3. K&R, bookmarked too.