{"id":80418,"date":"2021-12-28T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-28T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80418"},"modified":"2021-12-28T09:27:48","modified_gmt":"2021-12-28T15:27:48","slug":"government-is-the-things-we-do-together-stupidly-and-incompetently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80418","title":{"rendered":"Government Is The Things We Do Together, Stupidly And Incompetently"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the early days of the pandemic, an MIT scientist did what Americans have always done best; turned their ingenuity to solve a problem, fast, well and cheap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She developed a fast, inexpensive Covid test – in an amasingly short time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within a few weeks, Bosch and her colleagues had a test that would detect coronavirus in 15 minutes and produce a red line on a little chemical strip. The factory where they were planning to make tests for dengue fever could quickly retool to produce at least 100,000 COVID-19 tests per week, she said, priced at less than $10 apiece, or cheaper at a higher scale<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And then the FDA got involved:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the months that followed, Bosch responded to repeated requests from FDA reviewers for data and studies. When the agency finally put out guidance<\/a> that summer about the performance over-the-counter home tests needed to meet, officials required that such tests be nearly as sensitive as the lab tests used to definitively determine whether a patient has COVID-19.<\/p>

That standard proved difficult to meet. Rapid tests are usually sensitive enough to detect viral antigens when someone has enough of them to be able to spread the disease. Such tests are not as good at picking up cases in either earlier or later stages of infection, when viral loads are lower.<\/p>

Bosch\u2019s tests missed the FDA\u2019s high bar. It wasn\u2019t until the spring of 2021 that much larger companies were able to design similar tests \u2014 relatively inexpensive, over-the-counter rapid tests \u2014 that the agency found acceptable.<\/p>

\u201cYou could have antigen tests saving lives since the beginning of the pandemic,\u201d said Bosch, sitting in her lab at MIT. \u201cThat\u2019s the sad story.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes it feels a little simplistic, chanting \u201cgovernment is what holds us back\u201c, like some knee-jerk reductionist libertarian yahoo.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s not really wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the early days of the pandemic, an MIT scientist did what Americans have always done best; turned their ingenuity to solve a problem, fast, well and cheap. She developed a fast, inexpensive Covid test – in an amasingly short time: Within a few weeks, Bosch and her colleagues had a test that would detect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80418"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80429,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80418\/revisions\/80429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}