In late Feb.. the heroic U.W. team went ahead and tested for Covid-19 WITHOUT FEDERAL APPROVAL

[pnwmom]

after they tried and failed for a month to get the Trump administration to agree to letting them develop the test.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes&fbclid=IwAR3MkjVK_qd832sfelp8yBF2B0UDWyTsDNCgNesJ7zgKlPx93T2fyQYXcoo

As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.

To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.


By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.

What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.

“It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.”

In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days.

[BigmanPigman]

1. Congress had better investigate the response from team tRump.

This is a national health crisis and he made it worse and there is tons of proof. Every time the GOP mention investigating anything else, the Dems should cut them off with this priority, not investigating Hunter Biden, etc.

[oldtime dfl_er]

2. The Seattle Flu Study

which I think is what is referenced here, has been going on for quite some time, and it was fortunate because they have the infrastructure to quickly pivot from flu to corona. We can thank Bill Gates for funding it. The fact that they had to pivot without "permission" is nothing short of criminal.

[pnwmom]

3. Unfortunately, federal and state regulators have now stopped the study from including coronavirus

on the grounds that the participants hadn't given permission, and that the lab wasn't approved for clinical work.

Maybe this story can put pressure on all of them to relax their rules in the face of a national emergency.

Federal and state officials said the flu study could not be repurposed because it did not have explicit permission from research subjects; the labs were also not certified for clinical work. While acknowledging the ethical questions, Dr. Chu and others argued there should be more flexibility in an emergency during which so many lives could be lost. On Monday night, state regulators told them to stop testing altogether.


The failure to tap into the flu study, detailed here for the first time, was just one in a series of missed chances by the federal government to ensure more widespread testing during the early days of the outbreak, when containment would have been easier. Instead, local officials across the country were left to work in the dark as the crisis grew undetected and exponentially.