Sloppy laboratory practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused contamination that rendered the nation's first coronavirus tests ineffective, federal officials confirmed Saturday.Two of the three CDC laboratories in Atlanta that created the coronavirus test kits violated their
Sloppy laboratory practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused contamination that rendered the nation’s first coronavirus tests ineffective, federal officials confirmed Saturday.
Problems ranged from researchers entering and exiting the coronavirus laboratories without changing their coats, to test ingredients being assembled in the same room where researchers were working on positive coronavirus samples, officials said. Those practices made the tests sent to public health labs unusable because they were contaminated with the coronavirus, and produced some inconclusive results.
Forced to suspend the launch of a nationwide detection program for the coronavirus for a month, the CDC lost credibility as the nation’s leading public health agency and the country lost ground in ways that continue to haunt grieving families, the sick and the worried well from one state to the next.
Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the CDC, and other health experts have long suggested that contamination in the labs might have been the culprit. But even as several officials at the FDA late this week cited contamination as the cause, a spokesman for the CDC, Benjamin Haynes, asserted that it was still just a possibility and that the agency was still awaiting the formal findings of HHS.
“It was just tragic,” said Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “All that time when we were sitting there waiting, I really felt like, here we were at one of the most critical junctures in public health history, and the biggest tool in our toolbox was missing.”
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