The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published an announcement on its website saying that the agency will no longer honor the emergency use authorization of the PCR test for COVID testing beginning January 1, 2022. They are now encouraging the use of another COVID test.
According to the CDC, it will withdraw its request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay which was first introduced in February 2020 to detect COVID. To prepare for this change, the agency has ordered clinical laboratories and testing sites that have used the PCR assay to select and begin their transition to another FDA-approved COVID test.
"CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses," the CDC wrote in the new guidance. "Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season."
According to The Gateway Pundit, the faulty PCR tests are the reason why there had been a "disappearance of flu cases in the U.S. in 2020" and the reason behind the "inflated COVID cases" in America.
Meanwhile, Europe Reloaded argued that the CDC allowed the use of the PCR test because "They needed the fake test to keep the fear going in order to achieve as much vaccination, and therefore as much profit, as possible."
The report added that health authorities long knew about the inability of the PCR tests to determine the difference between COVID and the flu, but decided to withhold the implementation until the end of this year.
Very inefficient
In other COVID test-related news, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Tuesday that rapid antigen test may be less efficient in detecting the Omicron variant of the coronavirus and may even lead to a false negative. NBC Los Angeles reported that according to preliminary research from the FDA which was conducted alongside the National Institutes of Health's Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics program, data suggested that antigen tests "do detect the omicron variant but may have reduced sensitivity," which means that the tests may miss a COVID infection.
The FDA however, did not prohibit the use of such antigen tests, emphasizing instead that the findings in the study were based on lab data and not clinical study evaluations. The agency said it "continues to authorize the use of these tests as directed in the authorized labeling." It added that "Antigen tests are generally less sensitive and less likely to pick up very early infections compared to molecular tests."
Both the U.S. and U.K. are seeing a massive spike in COVID cases, with more than 440,000 new cases reported in America on Monday, BBC reported. Other countries that reported a record number of daily infections are France, Italy, Greece, Portugal and England. While reports suggest that the highly contagious Omicron variant is less likely to cause severe illness, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the risk posed by this variant "remains very high."
