CDC and FDA failed Americans in fight against coronavirus, Dr. Michael Lin from Stanford School of Medicine says
Nickie Louise
Posted On March 22, 2020
As deaths from coronavirus pandemic mount, everyone is talking about antimalaria drugs Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Azithromycin as potential treatments for the deadly COVID-19. However, a new evidence shows that CDC about knew the two drugs to be effective in treating SARS CoV since at least 2005. A new unearthed paper published in 2005 and shared with CDC, found that “Chloroquine is effective in preventing the spread of SARS CoV in cell culture.”
Also, a small trial by French researchers found highly positive results from hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin — “75% patients turned #coronavirus negative after 600mg hydroxychloroquine treatment for 6 days vs only 10% in control group. Rather than CDC working with international research to further explore the viability and safety of these drugs, CDC continues to be skeptical saying the research and results were based only on “anecdotal evidence.”
Now, in presentation by Dr. Michael Lin from The Lin Lab of Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Lin said that CDC and FDA have failed Americans in fight against the deadly coronavirus. In the presentation posted on Google Drive, Dr. Lin pointed out the incompetence of both the CDC and FDA, ranging from their inflexibility on testing guidelines and slow response to COVID-19 testing. Here some of the points he made:
- CDC was initially inflexible on testing guidelines (e.g. needed travel or exposure history).
- CDC created a test requiring a slow RT-PCR reaction on a specific model of machine, designed poor primers, and didn’t realize this for a month. This was both strategically (using 30-year-old technology) and tactically (designing bad primers) incompetent. I would expect most graduate students to do better.
- FDA was inflexible on tests: approved only the (initially flawed) CDC test, refused working tests from WHO and other countries (www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-testing-intl-hnk/index.html), even required CDC to retest results of other labs (www.propublica.org/article/the-fda-is-forcing-the-cdc-to-waste-time-double-testing-some-coronavirus-cases)
- CDC being too slow to understand and discuss treatments and vaccines.
- Providing non-information in place of information.
