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Comment by hcknwscommenter | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, and admittedly this is conjecture based on piecing together a bunch of off-hand comments by official spokespersons and a few industry insiders I talk to regularly, it's because the U.S. decided that everyone needs to use the same exact test. There is some validity to that approach in that it makes the data a lot better for comparison tracking. But, they compounded that somewhat defensible decision to require that everyone uses the same exact test kit. This turned into a disaster when the chosen supplier couldn't produce the reagents in the required time/amount.

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This an aside, but this seems like a textbook example of government regulation of healthcare not only failing but getting in the way and actively causing harm. There are literally 1000s of generally certified labs that they could have said very early on "go to it if you have this certification" and instead they plodded through this top-down heavy handed mess and made this pandemic many times worse.

In the US you have this combination of heavy over-regulation and lack of public provisioning. It's like the worst of both combined. Between this, cannabis, ketamine, and the opioid crisis, I absolutely do not understand why there isn't an uproar over overregulation in healthcare getting in the way.

None of those generally certified labs have any clue how to develop a new test. Not even a test that is exactly the same as a test they already have. There are 1000's of them, because you need very little training to push some buttons and enter data into forms. Those generally certified labs did what they are supposed to do. They looked to the government for guidance on what to test and how. The gov't made many mistakes: disbanding of the CDC pandemic response team. Putting anti-science Pence in charge. Forming a CDC team that was heavy on science and management but light on epidemiology. Not following the WHO's lead on their already established and working test. Listening to pharma's explanation about what they will be able to do in 12-18 months and confusing that with a statement about what they can do now. These are all mistakes that didn't have to happen and happened because morons are in charge.

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