LabGun coronavirus tests from South Korea are unloaded at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport on April 18. The tests, purchased by the state of Maryland for $9.46 million, were flawed and not used. (Maryland governor’s office)
“Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) spent $9.46 million in state funding to import 500,000 coronavirus tests from South Korea that turned out to be flawed and weren’t used, emails, documents and interviews show.
As it became clear that the much-touted tests could not help detect which Maryland residents had contracted the novel coronavirus, the Hogan administration quietly paid the same South Korean company $2.5 million for 500,000 replacement tests.
The state offered the tests free to two private labs, one of which declined because the tests took much longer to process than U.S. versions, records and interviews show.
The University of Maryland, which had spent months equipping its lab in Baltimore to process coronavirus tests, abandoned the replacement South Korean tests this fall after a spate of suspected false positives. But the other private lab continues to use them; a state official said Wednesday that 370,000 of the replacement tests have been used.
Hogan heralded the initial purchase as “an exponential, game-changing step forward” and featured it as the climax of his political memoir, published this summer.
“No one knew how many lives those 500,000 tests might save, but it would be a lot,” he wrote of their arrival in April at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. “The successful mission got tons of attention in the national media.”
Local officials in Maryland hoped that the purchase would make screening in the state more widely available. When the tests were not quickly deployed, they — and state lawmakers — began asking what was going on.
But Hogan and his top health and procurement officials withheld the tests’ flaws from the legislature, state spending authorities and the public, according to a review of public testimony and hundreds of pages of emails and other records.”
“On Friday, Maryland Democratic Party Chair Yvette Lewis released a statement following The Washington Post’s report, calling Hogan’s acquisition of the tests a “botched publicity stunt.”
“With Governor Hogan, everything seems to be performative. Instead of taking actions that would have actually helped Marylanders, it’s clear that the Governor was only concerned about his own personal optics. He knew the tests had failed and spent $2.5 million of taxpayer money to cover it up; all the while, he wrote about the tests in his memoir — declaring himself a hero. In the middle of a pandemic, Governor Hogan seems to have time to give hour-long speeches about Ronald Reagan’s leadership, but he clearly doesn’t have any time to be a leader himself. LinkTo Article
Link To Article Md. Gov. Hogan Spent $9Million on Faulty CV Tests From South Korea
“In fact, COVID-19 will go down as one of the political world’s biggest, most shamefully overblown, overhyped, overly and irrationally inflated and outright deceptively flawed responses to a health matter in American history, one that was carried largely on the lips of medical professionals who have no business running a national economy or government.
The facts are this: COVID-19 is a real disease that sickens some, proves fatal to others, mostly the elderly — and does nothing to the vast majority.”
There is zero scientificevidencethat the virus is spread byasymptomatic people.No study even exists asserting this claim. Yet a reputable, peer-reviewedscientific studyconcludes that asymptomatic peopleCANNOTspreadavirus.
States have increased “testing” of healthy people in order to report more “cases”.
The unreliable PCR tests used throughout the United States are being ran above 35 cycles despite the fact that doing socan provide inaccurate results as much as 97% of the time (seehttps://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa1491).Even Dr. Fauci said anything over 35 cycles was not accurate.
“The only study on cloth masks has been published athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577. This study found that wearing cloth masks is actually dangerous and can increase the risk of infections. We now ask the question; what science are these policies based on?”
