“Sloppy laboratory practicesat the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused contaminationthat rendered the nation’s first coronavirus tests ineffective,
In a statement on Saturday, a spokeswoman
for the F.D.A., Stephanie Caccomo, said, “C.D.C. did not manufacture
its test consistent with its own protocol.”
The F.D.A. confirmed its conclusions late this week after several media outlets requested public disclosure of its inquiry,
which assuredly is part of a larger federal investigation into the
C.D.C. lab irregularities by the Department of Health and Human
Services.
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.
To this day, the C.D.C.’s singular failure symbolizes how unprepared the federal government was in the early days to combat a fast-spreading outbreak of a new virus and it also highlights the glaring inability at the onset to establish a systematic testing policy that would have revealed the still unknown rates of infection in many regions of the country.
The blunders are posing new problems as some states with few cases
agitate to reopen and others remain in virtual lockdown with cases and
deaths still climbing.
While President Trump and other members of his administration [in 2020]
many public health officials and
epidemiologists have lamented the lack of consistent, reliable testing
across the country that would reflect the true prevalence of the
infection and perhaps enable a return to some semblance of normal life.
Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., and other health experts have long suggested that contamination in the labs
might have been the culprit. But even as several officials at the
F.D.A. late this week cited contamination as the cause, a spokesman for
the C.D.C., Benjamin Haynes, asserted that it was still just a
possibility and that
the agency was still awaiting the formal findings of H.H.S.
Initially, the C.D.C. was responsible for creating a coronavirus test that state and local public health agencies could use to diagnose Covid-19 in people, and then isolate them to prevent the spread of the disease.
“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.”
the F.D.A., which regulates medical devices, including laboratory tests.
“This is consistent with what we said was
plausible when we found the problem at the beginning,” Mr. Becker said.
“When we found the problem, it seemed to our community that it was a
contamination issue that would cause a problem to this extent.”
Meanwhile, the F.D.A. also came under
fire for not initially allowing commercial labs like Quest and LabCorp
and others to begin ramping up production of their own tests.
More than two months later, nearly 700,000 Americans have become infected and close to 40,000 have died. Testing is still rationed in some statesand
uneven in others, and it can take days before doctors and patients
receive results. Many infectious disease and public health experts say
“A version of this article appears in print on April 19, 2020, Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: C.D.C. Labs Were Contaminated, Delaying National Rollout of Testing, Officials Say.”
“Sixteen-year-old Lugansk resident Faina Savenkova is a young writer and journalist. This year she graduated from school and entered a journalism faculty. The girl has long been known outside the republic for her repeated appeals to world leaders and the UN. For this, the Kiev regime posted Faina’s data on the Mirotvorets [“Peacemaker” — S] website; she was only 12 years old at the time.
In 2021, I addressed the UN with a video message that the children of Donbass have the right to a peaceful life, after which the Ukrainian nationalist website Mirotvorets published my family’s and my personal data,
after which I began to receive threats and insults.
Only because I asked world powers to help the children of Donbass live peacefully and happily, as children should. Now this website contains the personal data of almost 400 children who are also in danger. President Zelenskiy can stop this website with one stroke of the pen and return the children to a peaceful life,
We, the children of Donbass, Belgorod and Kursk regions,did
not start this war, and I have always advocated for children to live in
peace and not be afraid to close their eyes and fall asleep. As a person fighting for children’s right to a peaceful life, I think you will understand me.
Cuomo Leads Mamdani in a Head-to-Head Race by 15 Points”
NEW YORK, July 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — “A new poll from HarrisX finds the New York City mayoral race shaping up to be a tight and competitive contest, with Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani
While Mamdani leads Mayor Eric Adams in a head-to-head race, the poll
shows Cuomo defeating the Democratic nominee by a wide 15-point margin
in a one-on-one contest.
In a four-way race, Mamdani (26 percent) is tied with Cuomo (23 percent) and Sliwa (22 percent), all within the margin of error. Adams is at 13 percent and 15 percent of voters are undecided.
In a three-way racewithout Adams, Cuomo (31 percent) is statistically tiedwith Mamdani (29 percent) and Sliwa (28 percent).
In head-to-head matchups, Mamdani topples Adams 43 percent to 36 percent, but trails Cuomo 35 percent to 50 percent, a 15-point advantage for Cuomo.
The results show that Mamdani benefits most if Cuomo is not in the race, gaining a 10-point lead in that scenario. Conversely, Cuomo gains ground if Adams is not in the race and wins outright in a head-to-head matchup with Mamdani.
“These numbers show a volatile race still taking shape,” said Dritan
Nesho, CEO of HarrisX. “While the progressive base is fueling Mamdani’s
rise, Cuomo’s broad name recognitionand moderate appeal make him a formidable general election challenger.”
Respondents are recruited through opt-in, web-panel recruitment sampling.
Recruitment occurs through a broad variety of professional, validated
respondent panels to expand the sampling frame as wide as possible and
minimize the impact of any given panel on recruiting methods. The
results reflect a representative sample of likely registered voters in
New York City.
Results were weighted for age, gender, race/ethnicity, income, education, borough, party,
and ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population.
HarrisX is a leading strategic research, data analytics and AI
consultancy focused on emerging technologies, business and social
trends, public policy and politics. HarrisX conducts multi-method
research in the United States and over 50 countries around the world on
behalf of Fortune 100 companies, public institutions, NGOs, global
leaders and philanthropic organizations.
HarrisX was the most accurate pollster of the 2020 U.S. presidential
election, and one of the most accurate outfits in the 2024 presidential
election,
correctly calling the results in five out of seven battleground states and the national vote.” Above image from Harrisx
leading to the U.S.-backed war against themby
the unconstitutional government….[By brutally violent means, Ukraine thugs helped Ukraine become a US colony. No one had
asked the people in Eastern regions if they wanted to be a US colony].
This is how Robert Parry, founder of Consortium News,reported the story on May 10, 2014. He emphasized
in the 2014 unconstitutional change of government and the part played by Neo-Nazis in Ukraine,which the U.S.government, corporate media and their “anti-disinformation” allies are still trying to hide.
“May 10, 2014, Exclusive: For the second time in a week, Ukrainian anti-regime protesters holed up in a building were killed by firesset by pro-regimeattackers with ties to newly formed neo-Nazi security forces, reports Robert Parry.”
By Robert Parry, Special to Consortium News First published May 10, 2014
As some 40 or more ethnic Russians were burned alive or died of smoke inhalation, the crowd outside mocked them as red-and-black Colorado potato beetles, with the chant of “Burn, Colorado, burn.”
Afterwards, reporters spotted graffiti on the building’s walls containing Swastika-like symbols and honoring the “Galician SS,” the Ukrainian adjunct to the German SS in World War II.
as neo-Nazi paramilitaries organized now as the regime’s “National Guard” were dispatched
to a police station that had been seized by dissidents,
possibly including police officers who rejected a new Kiev-appointed
chief.
Again, the deployment of the “National Guard” was followed by burning the buildingand killing a significant but still-undetermined number of people inside. (Early estimates of the dead range from seven to 20.)
These extremists were reorganized as special units of the
National Guard and dispatched to the east and south to do the dirty work that the regular Ukrainian military was unwilling to do.
The slur of calling the Odessa protesters Colorado beetles — as they
were being burned alive — was a reference to the black-and-red colors
used by the ethnic Russian resistance in the east.
Though the mainstream U.S. press either describes Parubiy simplyas the interim government’s chief of national security (with no further context) or possibly as a “nationalist,” his fuller background includes his founding of the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Last year, he became commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”
Then, on April 15, [2014] after becoming the Kiev
regime’s chief of national security and finding Ukrainian troops
unwilling to fire on fellow Ukrainians in the east, Parubiy went on Twitter to announce, “Reserve unit of National Guard formed #Maidan Self-defense volunteers was sent to the front line this morning.”
The Times mentioned the appearance and then disappearance of the National Guard without providing any useful background about this newly organized force.
The Times reported the May 9 [2014] attack in Mariupol this way:
“Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov,wrote
on Facebook that about 60 pro-Russian militants had tried to seize the
city’s police headquarters. The police called for support from the
Ukrainian national guard, a newly formed force of quickly trained
volunteers drawn from participants in last winter’s street protests in
the capital.
Mr. Avakov wrote that 20 ‘terrorists’ had died in the fighting, while those who survived dispersed and hid in a residential neighborhood.”
The Times added:
“The national guard, though, pulled out of the city soon afterward. Residents who had gathered around the police station offered an account that differed from the interior minister’s.
The city police, they said, were sympathetic to the pro-Russian side
and had mutinied against an out-of-town chief newly installed by the
interim government in Kiev.
Armored vehicles had driven into the city to confront the rebellious police, not the militants, residents said. Holes in the brick wall suggested heavy weaponry. Gunfire echoed downtown.”
After the deaths inside Mariupol’s police station, the Kiev regime rejoiced at the extermination of a large number of “terrorists.”
As the U.K.’s Independent reported, “The military action
is accompanied by stridently aggressive rhetoric from politicians in
Kiev who are crowing about the numbers of ‘terrorists’ killed and threatening further lethal punishment.”
The Kiev’s regime’s concern that some local police forces have at best mixed loyalties has
led it again to turn to the Maidan “self-defense” forces to serve as a
special “Kiev-1” police force, which was dispatched to Odessa amid that city’s recent violence.
Deniable Forces
A group of Nicaraguan Contras rest after a firefight, Jan. 1, 1987. (Tiomono, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Though many Americans don’t want to believe that their government would collaborate with neo-Nazis or other extremist elements, there
actually has been a long history of just that.
In conflicts as diverse as the revolutions in Central America and the anti-Soviet Afghan war in the 1980s to the current civil conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, it has not been uncommon for
the side favored by the United States to rely on extremist paramilitary forces to engage in the most brutal fighting.
In Central American conflicts that I covered for the Associated Press and Newsweekin the 1980s, some of the “death squads” associated with pro-U.S. regimeswere drawn from neo-fascist movements allied with the far-right World Anti-Communist League.
to kill Russians and their Afghan government allies.
Today, in Syria, many of the most aggressive fighters against Bashar al-Assad’s government
are Arab jihadists recruited from across the region and armed by Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms.
So, it fits with a pattern for the U.S. government to hold its nose and rely on neo-Nazis from western Ukraine to take the fight to rebellious ethnic Russians in the east and south.
The key to all these unsavory alliances is for the American people not to know about the real nature of these U.S. clients.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration advanced the concept of “public diplomacy”
of U.S.-backed forces in El Salvador and Guatemala and the C.I.A.-trained Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Thus, most Americans weren’t sure what to make of recurring reports about right-wing
“death squads” killing priests and nuns
and committing other massacres across Central America.
Regarding Afghanistan, it took the American people until Sept. 11, 2001, to fully comprehend whom the Reagan administration had been working with in the 1980s.
Similarly, the Obama administration has tried to maintain the fiction that the Syrian opposition
So, it should come as no surprise that the Kiev regime would turn to its Maidan “self-defense” forces formed around neo-Nazi militias to go into southern and eastern Ukraine with the purpose of burning to death ethnic Russian“insects” occupying buildings.
As US rests safely between two vast oceans, Trump tells Mr. Putin to “get moving” on Ukraine peace negotiations.First, what makes pathetic Trump think he can order Mr. Putin to do anything? Second, “endless unwinnable wars” financed by unlimited access to US taxpayer cash has been US government policy for 80 years. The only people who can reverse US policy are unelected–-meaning, not Trump.
Talk about a missed opportunity, a life wasted. If there was one person who was presented with the first-hand experience needed to turn against bloodshed, it was John McCain.
What’s more, during his time in the House and later the Senate,
Something even that the US losing their war in Vietnam might have taught him. It entirely passed him by. McCain still never saw an opportunity to wage battle somewhere, anywhere on the planet, that he didn’t like.
it apparently becomes too difficult to see how the world outside changes, let alone to adapt to those changes. If you limit the time a president can serve, why not do the same for senators? Is it because those same senators would have to vote on that?
that you purport to serve. Especially, and first of all, to the American soldiers you desire to send out there to fight those wars. But also a threat to the image of America around the globe.
Again, even apart from morals and ethics. You will have to find other ways to deal with ‘elements’ that feel and act less than friendly towards you.
To find out what, it helps to realize that they understand it’s just as
futile for them to attack you militarily as it is for you to attack
them. It also helps to figure out why they are unfriendly….
McCain’s father and grandfather were both 4-star US Navy admirals.
Perhaps that partly explains his blindness to the evils of war, and the
role the US has played in many conflicts, including -but certainly not
limited to- Vietnam. It’s hard to imagine Apocalypse Now, Platoon or Full Metal Jacket being McCain’s favorite Hollywood classics….
There will continue to be technological developments, but there’s no “throughput”. You can fire some missiles into some desert somewhere from time to time, and that’s it.
This is largely why the American defense budget is 10 times larger than its Russian counterpart. All this happened on John McCain’s watch….
The world has entered a whole new era. And this didn’t happen yesterday.
Russia and China may have only recently [as of 2018] announced new
hypersonic missile technology, but it didn’t fall out of the sky. It
does profoundly change things though.
It ends all notions and dreams of American exceptionalism and
unilateralism.
And America needs to learn that lesson.the American view of the world will have to change, because the world itself has….
Living on a thin line (living on a thin line) Living this way, each day is a dream What am I, what are we supposed to do? Living on a thin line (living on a thin line), ooh Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line (living on a thin line), ooh Tell me now, what are we supposed to do? Living on a thin line (living on a thin line), ooh Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line, ooh Tell me now, what are we supposed to do? Living on a thin line (living on a thin line), ooh Tell me now, what are we supposed to do? Living on a thin line, ooh.”
“Sloppy laboratory practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused contamination that rendered the nation’s first coronavirus tests ineffective,
