Azar just released a delusional, alternative history of Covid testing in the US. I’m mad because our testing failures allowed this outbreak to blow-up. We can’t fix our system if we ignore where it is broken. I suspect @PublicHealth agrees.

My fact-check on remarks @HHSGov 🧵

“It is indisputable that the United States has built the most extensive testing system and strategy of any major country,” says Azar.

False. Several countries have had percent positivity ~1% whereas US has never been below 5% and is >10% today. Refs KCDC & USA @JohnsHopkins
"The federal government got out of the way of test development in safe and sensible ways,” says Azar.

False. In Feb, CDC & FDA blocked labs from testing as the disease spread exponentially. I broke this story👇🏼& wrote more like it as the year wore on. https://t.co/5zbGfZaSry
Azar defends questions about why the CDC refused an early German test vetted & distributed by WHO, by saying it was ‘unapproved’ & beneath us.

False. Top US researchers in my stories vetted several tests as early as Feb,& found that the one recommended by WHO was ideal.
Azar refuses to concede that other countries handled Covid better. He attributes Koreas success to less travel, invasiveness & private sector.

False. Korea's gov't marshaled the private sector & tracing success was largely from hiring tons of tracers. https://t.co/Ad1D1kpd6Q
Here's a nugget of truth. The FDA held back academic labs from testing, and have been unclear. Researchers testing like @srikosuri @UrnovFyodor may be interested in this part of the discussion.
Azar asserts "There is a myth out there that, if only we’d had a superior testing system, we simply could have caught any cases and isolated them."

False (except for it being simple). Any outbreak specialist tells you that early days matter most. That's THE time for containment.
I need to get back to work but the speech goes on. I'll try to return to this later. In the meantime, here's my piece with @jefftollef about testing failures and why they matter so much. https://t.co/7pL6SzLvNc

More from Science

https://t.co/a6yrWK5dqg


https://t.co/Xe5xFdtDfO


https://t.co/e3RBxj0ly3


https://t.co/cJlCMqyP2v


https://t.co/5n5TK67iKB
"NO LONGER BEST IN THE WORLD"
UNEP's new Human Development Index includes a new (separate) index: Planetary pressures-adjusted HDI (PHDI). News in Norway is that its position drops from #1 to #16 because of this, while Ireland rises from #2 to #1.
Why?

https://t.co/aVraIEzRfh


Check out Norway's 'Domestic Material Consumption'. Fossil fuels are no different here to Ireland's. What's different is this huge 'non-metallic minerals' category.
(Note also the jump in 1998, suggesting data problems.)
https://t.co/5QvzONbqmN


In Norway's case, it looks like the apparent consumption equation (production+imports-exports) for non-metal minerals is dominated by production: extraction of material in Norway.
https://t.co/5QvzONbqmN


And here we see that this production of non-metallic minerals is sand, gravel and crushed rock for construction. So it's about Norway's geology.
https://t.co/y6rqWmFVWc


Norway drops 15 places on the PHDI list not because of its CO₂ emissions (fairly high at 41st highest in the world per capita), but because of its geology, because it shifts a lot of rock whenever it builds anything.
https://t.co/hXlo8qgkD0
Look like that they got a classical case of PCR Cross-Contamination.
They had 2 fabricated samples (SRX9714436 and SRX9714921) on the same PCR run. Alongside with Lung07. They did not perform metagenomic sequencing on the “feces” and they did not get


A positive oral or anal swab from anywhere in their sampling. Feces came from anus and if these were positive the anal swabs must also be positive. Clearly it got there after the NA have been extracted and were from the very low-level degraded RNA which were mutagenized from

The Taq.
https://t.co/yKXCgiT29w to see SRX9714921 and SRX9714436.
Human+Mouse in the positive SRA, human in both of them. Seeing human+mouse in identical proportions across 3 different sequencers (PRJNA573298, A22, SEX9714436) are pretty straight indication that the originals

Were already contaminated with Human and mouse from the very beginning, and that this contamination is due to dishonesty in the sample handling process which prescribe a spiking of samples in ACE2-HEK293T/A549, VERO E6 and Human lung xenograft mouse.

The “lineages” they claimed to have found aren’t mutational lineages at all—all the mutations they see on these sequences were unique to that specific sequence, and are the result of RNA degradation and from the Taq polymerase errors accumulated from the nested PCR process

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