The Right Side of the News

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In an unusual move, even in times of disaster, the White House stepped into the federal purchasing process, ordering the Federal Emergency Management Agency to award a contract to AirBoss of America. The Trump administration has rushed through hundreds of deals to address the pandemic without the usual oversight, more than $760 million reported as of this week, but the AirBoss transaction is the single largest no-bid purchase, a ProPublica analysis of federal purchasing data found.

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While FEMA placed the order, it was directed to do so by the White House, ProPublica found.

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It is unclear why the White House chose AirBoss for the protective equipment, which is similar to products made by other vendors.

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How reliable are these tests?
Over 50 commercial manufacturers are seeking FDA approval for antibody tests, Theel said.

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But Dr. Raed Dweik, chairman of the Respiratory Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, said some of the tests he's seen aren't accurate enough to determine if someone is truly immune to the coronavirus.

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This is because antibodies for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 look very similar to antibodies that respond to coronaviruses that cause other illnesses, such as the common cold.

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Tests could mistakenly identify antibodies as being for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, producing a false positive. Dweik said it will take more time to develop a test that can accurately detect the right antibodies.

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"The timing is tricky," he said. "Developing this test has been fraught with problems."

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In addition, scientists don't know a lot about the protective value of coronavirus antibodies, said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert and executive associate dean at Emory University. The test to identify HIV, for example, is an antibody test. "Having those antibodies doesn't necessarily mean immunity," he said.

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Few of the coronavirus antibody tests have been vetted to determine their clinical accuracy, Theel said. No test is 100 percent accurate, she said, and it's up to the clinical laboratories to decide which ones are best for their patients.

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"It's one of the biggest concerns right now because there's so many tests out there and we don’t know how the vast majority of them work," she said.

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Antibody tests that would verify whether a person recently had the novel coronavirus could be available within a week, according to the nation's top infectious disease expert.

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"Within a period of a week or so, we're going to have a rather large number of tests that are available," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CNN's "New Day" Friday morning.

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The ad clips Biden’s words out of context to misleadingly imply that Biden criticized Trump’s decision to restrict travel from China, when that’s not what Biden did, wrote Sargent. Second, the ad relies on numerous past quotes from Biden to demonstrate he’s supposedly been soft on China. But those quotes were mostly boilerplate diplomatic language and Trump has repeatedly praised China in language very close to what Biden has used And third, the Asian man that Biden bowed to turns out to be Gary Locke, a former Washington governor and U.S. ambassador to China, an American.

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But there’s a deeper absurdity here that needs to be appreciated, continued Sargent. Throughout the early weeks of coronavirus, Trump repeatedly praised China’s handling of coronavirus. Importantly, this praise was central to advancing the argument that Trump had totally beaten down coronavirus with merciless force and efficiency: Trump kept insisting he was successfully collaborating with China to defeat it. Yet at around that same time, Biden was warning against taking China’s assurances about coronavirus at face value.

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On February 25, for example, Trump praised China for working very, very hard to contain the virus, and that it’s going to go away before it does real harm in America because China is getting it more and more under control.

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