What a difference a year ago.
In August 2020, the Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency use authorization (US) for the Abbott Card BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag, a $ 5, 15-minute quick test that is now widely used to detect highly infectious variants. The test is a portable and affordable tool in the battle against COVID-19 infection, as well as a book example of the Trump administration’s close collaboration with the private sector to develop solutions to complex problems.
Fast forward to August 2021. The New York News found that the leadership of Abbott Laboratories instructed employees to dismantle and destroy thousands of rapid tests before announcing widespread layoffs at its Maine plant.
The reason? We emphasize the importance of testing over the past nine months by the Biden administration.
Innovations in diagnostic testing such as the Abbott BinaxNOW rapid test did not happen by chance. In the early days of the pandemic, private companies that could rapidly scale production collaborated closely with an interdisciplinary interdisciplinary team of federal experts to guide research, investment, and the deployment of new innovations.
Literally a card with chemicals, the BinaxNOW test has a sensitivity of 91.7 percent and specificity of 98.5 percent to detect an individual’s infectivity almost in real time. Shortly after the FDA issued the U.S. BinaxNOW, the Department of Health and Human Services immediately acquired and deployed the first 150 million tests produced in weekly shipments to states, nursing homes, historically black universities and colleges, and other vulnerable populations. It made a difference.
The BinaxNOW test was not the first diagnostic test Abbott developed in collaboration with the Trump administration. In late March 2020, the company received a US for Abbott ID SEE COVID-19 test. At the time, NOW identification was a novelty and I desperately needed it to expand testing capacity. Once the FDA issued the emergency authorization, HHS immediately acquired half of its production line and deployed them to all public health laboratories in all U.S. states and territories, including an increased number. to help rural and tribal areas that did not have access to the central area. laboratory COVID tests.
Presumably lack of widespread availability COVID testing was a distinctive theme during the 2020 presidential campaign. Media coverage often clouded the Trump administration’s decisions to reverse and scale the supply chain of diagnostic tests with distrust and demagoguery about how the lack of evidence during the global pandemic had failed the American people. When we left office in January 2021, there were 170 million tests available for use, not counting the grouped tests that could have easily doubled if that total hadn’t tripled.
One day after being invested, President Biden
Joe BidenHenri went into tropical depression when it rains in northeastern Britain to urge G7 leaders to consider adopting sanctions against the Taliban – report five lawmakers who will have to monitor the House’s budget vote MORE issued a executive order establish a “COVID-19 Pandemic Test Board to ensure a sustainable public health workforce.” As the United States and other countries experience the devastating increase in hospitalizations for people suffering from the highly transmissible delta variant, the Biden Pandemic Test Board should work closely with the private sector to ensure the development and the production of diagnostic tests, vaccines and other necessary supplies. to combat COVID-19 and prevent unnecessary destruction of resources.
As COVID variants appear and spread in unexpected populations, including those of children i vaccinated people presenting with little or no symptoms, the Biden administration should facilitate a massive distribution of COVID tests to states, schools, residences, and hospitals to improve individual medical outcomes. Doing so will also improve the quality of our own data, so we will not have to rely on the data collected. Israel and the UK. Through increased testing, our public health system will also be able to detect a more accurate number of infections, especially in areas of high community prevalence by asymptomatic individuals.
The Biden administration needs to work closely with private sector companies like Abbott, so that our precious resources of time, manpower and federal funding are not wasted during COVID rises and as the medical community prepares for another potentially highly transmissible flu fall and winter mixed with COVID.
Partnerships to ensure a flexible and effective diagnostic testing ecosystem will expand testing capacity to quickly diagnose people and mitigate emerging outbreaks, especially in communities, schools, and other high-risk or congregational settings.
Mia Palmieri Heck previously served in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services President Trump
Donald Trump Kamala Harris Should Offer Vietnam’s Market Economy Condition Supporters of Alabama Rally Trump, After Telling Them to Vaccinate CNN Posthumously, Issues Final Interview with Deceased Representative Paul Mitchell MORE and during the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and is now Vice President of Foreign Affairs at the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy.