RE: Onwards and Upwards - Pure Speculation18 Jul 2021 00:13
"...No joke ?? husband and wife with 3 school kids have had 5 packs of seven tests this week..."
I think the DHSC are desperately dumping Innova tests as quick as possible so they can say they use them all up and save face.
If they order any more Innova tests they will have lost ALL credibility as a Gov in control. This will all come out in the wash and the general public start to realise.
from the BMJ: (sorry it's long but needs repeating!)
"...The MHRA is an agency of the DHSC and has no independent legal status. Bizarrely, the authorisation is given by the secretary of state for health and social care (acting as the MHRA) to themselves (as the DHSC and deemed legal manufacturer) to supply the tests. The DHSC has entered into several contracts with Innova Medical Group for the tests, valued at perhaps as much as £3.2 billion. Innova is owned by Pasaca Capital, a California based, Nevada registered, private equity firm. It is reported to be setting up a manufacturing plant in Wales. Currently, according to their instructions for use, the tests are manufactured for Innova by Xiamen Biotime Biotechnology, based in Fujian, China, and are intended to be used on those “suspected of COVID-19 by their healthcare provider within the first five days of the onset of symptoms.” Yet in the UK millions of them are being used for twice weekly testing of asymptomatic people in schools, communities, nursing homes, workplaces, and for attending hospitals and clinics—in other words, not in accordance with the real manufacturer’s instructions.
In addition, it is clear that the tests are being used not only outside their instructions for use, but also as a “test to enable,” which the original authorisation explicitly states is not supported by the MHRA. This is because there has been no scientific evidence to date that supports their use as “green light tests” to enable activities such as attending school, nursing homes, football matches, workplaces, or public hearings. They are at best “red light tests” to detect infection when used by health professionals.
All tests can do harm, and key issues with LFTs are that performance is markedly impaired when they are not administered by experienced professionals. This results in false negatives, including in symptomatic people who opt for a home LFT as a more accessible alternative to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. False positives will outnumber true positives when prevalence is very low, as occurred in initial testing of schoolchildren. For example, recent evidence suggests that at very low prevalence, testing a population of 50 million twice a week would produce more than 200?000 false positive results each month, with relatively few infected people detected. A recent evaluation of the community testing of asymptomatic adults in Liverpool was published, but there is still no evaluation of the sensitivity of LFTs when used as unsupervised self-tests in asymptomatic people. ..."
Sign In
Follow the stocks
