Biden, Trump Wrong About WHO Coronavirus Tests

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/biden-trump-wrong-about-who-coronavirus-tests/

• Former Vice President Joe Biden falsely claimed that the WHO “offered the testing kits that they have available” but “we refused them.” The U.S. did not actively turn down testing kits from the WHO, although it could have requested them. The kits, however, are primarily intended for lower income nations without testing capacity.
• President Donald Trump also falsely claimed that the WHO test “was a bad test.” The test is highly accurate and has performed well.
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•  That brings us to how well the WHO test performs — and Trump’s false claim that the test was “bad.”
  Trump may have concluded this from the way Birx responded when asked about Biden’s claim. She emphasized quality control of testing kits and said, “It doesn’t help to put out a test where 50% or 47% are false positives.”
  False positives are instances in which a test says a person has the disease when a person doesn’t — and should test negative. In the reverse problem, a person who has the disease can test negative when they are actually positive, in what’s called a false negative.
  But there is no evidence that the WHO test doesn’t work well. Sampath, whose organization is now testing different COVID-19 assays from various manufacturers to provide independent verification for countries, said there are “no known issues” with the test. The WHO’s Ryan also said in a CNN interview that the test has performed “extremely well in the field, in multiple countries.”
  “The test has been validated in three external laboratories, adapted by WHO and manufactured in line with international quality standards,” a WHO spokesperson said. “It has shown consistently good performance in laboratory and clinical use, and neither a significant number of false-positive nor false-negative results have been reported.”
  The White House and the vice president’s office did not respond to our requests for comment or clarification. But Birx told the New York Times that the test she alluded to with a 47 to 50% false positive rate was not the WHO test, but rather a diagnostic used in China.
  A study there found that 47% or more of people who didn’t have symptoms and had been in close contact with someone with COVID-19 might have been improperly flagged as having the disease. The paper, however, has been retracted, and the English-language abstract didn’t report the test’s overall false positive rate.
  NPR reported the retraction after FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn referenced the study again in an on-air interview. According to NPR, the retraction occurred a few days after publication on March 5. The retraction was not indicated on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s biomedical literature database, until March 26.