Did Obama-Era CDC Bureaucrats Botch The Coronavirus Testing Response?
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Tue, 03/17/2020
By now, it’s become abundantly clear that the federal government’s sluggishness in distributing functioning tests to labs around the country is one reason why governors and big-city mayors across the country are closing schools and businesses in preparation for a de facto 2 week quarantine.
The government seemingly had the whole month of February to distribute tests, which it should have been receiving from the WHO, which had contracted with a small Germany biotech firm to to produce millions of tests.
Instead, the CDC had only distributed a few thousand tests at the end of last month, and seems to have only taken steps to fix the problem over the last week, after a hail of criticism from doctors and experts as thousands of patients complained they didn’t have access to tests.
Meanwhile, all the Obama-era employees and underlings responsible for getting their leaders up to speed (like Dr. Messonnier, who is mentioned several times in the WaPo report), repeatedly told their bosses that this is the standard response and that they must wait for the CDC to figure out this knot of problems before opening the gates to corporate partners.
And as far as Dr. Fauci is concerned, he actually works for the NIH.
Now, as WaPo mentions in the final paragraphs of its story, a former CDC director who led the agency during the Obama years is calling for an “investigation” of the CDC’s botched response.
Thomas Frieden, an infectious disease physician who served as CDC director under former president Barack Obama, called on Sunday for an “independent group” to investigate what went wrong with the CDC’s testing process. He said in the past, the CDC moved quickly to produce tests for diseases such as H1N1, or swine flu.
“We were able to get test kits out fast,” Frieden said on CNN. “Something went wrong here. We have to find out why so we can prevent that in the future.”
Frieden said the agency has been muzzled under President Trump and despite the multitude of problems with the rollout of testing, “the CDC is still the greatest public health institution in the world.”
We suspect he already knows where the bodies might be buried.
