Should we still test for COVID?
Biden sending out the free home kits again, but some doctors say to stop testing to stop more mask and vaccines mandates
We can all order four more “free” COVID tests from the government on Monday as the website reopens.
In the past, I’ve always ordered my share. I used two of them to know I got the virus last Christmas. But I’m considering not ordering this time as a way to protest methods that could bring back masking and vaccine mandates.
(If you’re new here, I’m not anti-vax. I didn’t get a COVID vaccine because I didn’t think it was necessary, and I was right. I believe strongly that we all have to make our own health and medical decisions and not judge others.)
Promoting Testing
The Biden administration announced it is spending $600 million to have COVID test manufacturers start making more supplies to backfill as it reopened COVIDTests.gov.
The government says the tests will detect the “currently circulating variants” over the holiday season. The CDC still recommends you do a home test if you have symptoms or have just been exposed to COVID-19.
The AP reported this about the new round of home tests:
Dawn O’Connell, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, said that though some portions of the public may be tired of the pandemic and its implications, at home-testing remains a key way to slow the spread of new cases.
“The spread” can’t be stopped. So what else is their rationale?
O’Connell said the new home test focuses on “getting through the holidays and making sure folks can take a test if they’re going to see Grandma for Thanksgiving.”
This is the same Grandma who was told not to see her grandchildren for a year because of the totally false narrative that kids were spreading COVID. Is she really demanding her supposedly asymptomatic kids get tested to see her?
Docs against testing:
Prominent medical experts who challenge the public health establishment — like Dr. Martin Adel Makary of Johns Hopkins and Dr. Vinay Prasad of UC San Francisco —have expressed concerns.
Dr.
posted about this new round of home tests:The U.S. testing-industrial complex continues at taxpayer expense. The U.S. is an international outlier.
I messaged Dr. Makary and asked if he had written more about the testing issue. He pointed me to his op-ed in The Washington Post from over two years ago in which he wrote that “overtesting” is “distorting our perception of the risk of covid-19 and our ability to assess the current public health threat.”
He was ahead of his time.
I started reconsidering having tests at home recently after reading Dr.
‘s Substack about resistance to stop “irrational” public-health decisions.“If you are sick— do not test yourself for COVID. (after all, Paxlovid data almost surely doesn’t apply to you),” wrote Dr. Prasad. “It’s time to go dark with all COVID data. If enough people don’t participate, the irrationality will stop.”
Just imagine no more news stories or government warnings about cases increasing. It would certainly calm society’s anxiety and possibly end any just cause for mandates.
Self-report your results
The reopened test kit website also has a link that pushes you to self-report your results to be a good citizen. It says:
Reporting your result — whether negative or positive — helps your nation learn how to use those test results effectively.
How? It doesn’t say.
When you go to the site to report your home test is positive or negative, you’re then asked what brand test you took. Once you give that information, you give your age, zip code and when you took the test. You can click on it as many times as you want.
Dr. Houman David Hemmati tweeted about it:
This is so prone to fraud and selection bias. Literally anyone can anonymously submit a fake test result. I wonder why they're so desperate to unscientifically collect so many "positive" COVID tests.... any thoughts?
Expired FDA tests
These new tests come out on top of the 775 million already sent by mail. This new round of tests will expire on Dec. 31 but “will include clear instructions on how to verify extended expiration dates.”
That is a rabbit hole you don’t want to go down, so I did it for you. On the current test ordering website, you can click over to this FDA link to know if your current tests have dates past what it says on the box.
I have two kits that expired in May. To write this to you, I tried for about 20 minutes to figure out if mine had extended expiration dates on the FDA site.
You first have to find the exact manufacturer and kit. Then you go through a long list of expiration dates and try to match them to the lot numbers. It is an endless scroll of this hell:
I never found mine.
Will I order new tests?
I know many of you never tested or stopped testing a long time ago. I am on the fence…