Yes, the CDC distributed tainted tests initially, but NO they were not infecting anyone, and NO they were not giving false positives.

As a GLPer that loves this site and is concerned by the amount of rampant false statements and absolutely unsuported and wrong accusations being spawned by the controversial pandemic that is affecting the entire planet, and truthfull to therole of GLP as a site for investigative citizen research of controversial topics, I felt the need and almost obligation to start this thread to set the record straight.

At least two threads I have read lately have been propagating absolute misinformation and letting people get a completely wrong idea of what happened about the fact that the US CDC initially distributed tainted testing kits that were useless to detect infection.

The most prominent thread that discussed this issue was located here:

Thread: CDC’S FAILED CORONAVIRUS TESTS WERE TAINTED WITH CORONAVIRUS, FEDS CONFIRM

And got a shockingly high start rating.

I strongly disagree with the massively wrong idea expressed by most of the commenters on that thread, that probably never bothered to read the original source, that the tests were capable of infecting people, and the second most commented, and equally wrong, assertion that all these teste gave false positives.

Reading the original source (the link in the OP of that thread is a second hand source and the original is a New York Times article that can be read here: [link to www.nytimes.com (secure)] ), it is clear that at no point anyone was at risk of getting the disease from these admitedly haphazardly manufactured tests, because the taint was on the control vials part of the tests that is used to confirm the validity of the test and that are supposed to be absolutely free of virus genetic material.

If anyone care to educate themselves with how the test is performed, it should be clear that the only part of the testing in which the patient takes part is in the collection of the nasopharingeal swab, and these swabs have nothing to do with the test manufacturer and come factory steryle, so neither the patient nor the swab collector never ever sees, nor touches the PCR testing vials that are prepared with their swabs. So, please, be sure to understand that NO ONE EVER COULD HAVE BEEN INFECTED WITH ONE OF THESE TESTS.

The other absolutely false affirmation stating thatt the tests were tainted to give false positive results is even more moronic. This is another completely wrong conclusion, as the tainted tests, which are read by a machine, were impossible to interpret as positive because the tainting affected the control vial, making the tests unreadable / inconclusive, forcing to make a repeat test to get an asnwer. So, NOT ONE OF THE TAINTED TEST COULD HAVE BEEN READ AS EITHER POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE, ALL OF THEM WERE READ AS INCONCLUSIVE/INVALID BY THE AUTOMATED READING PCR MACHINE.

The REAL AND GRAVE PROBLEM caused by CDC's botched tests was that the tests were useless for detecting infection, hence, many people was not able to be properly and timely diagnosed, therefore this caused many infected people to have time to increase the contagion numbers by interacting with non infected people while CDC was struggling to get a properly working test.

Nothing more, nothing less.

So, I have to say, that thread that was posted was unproperly represented and was interpreted by most in a very sensasionalist and misleading way that was not at all adressing the true nature and gravity of the problem caused by the CDC's initial failure of manufacturing a quality PCR test kit for detecting the virus.