Update on Rapid Antigen Tests

In July of 2020 in Frequent, Fast and Cheap is Better than Sensitive, I wrote:

A number of firms have developed cheap, paper-strip tests for coronavirus that report results at-home in about 15 minutes but they have yet to be approved for use by the FDA because the FDA appears to be demanding that all tests reach accuracy levels similar to the PCR test. This is another deadly FDA mistake.

It’s depressing that we are still moving so slowly on these issues but the media has finally gotten on board. Earlier I mentioned David Leonhardt’s article. Here is Margaret Hartmann in the New York Magazine.

In many Asian and European countries, at-home COVID-19 tests are cheap and easy to find in stores. CBS News reported this month that home antigen tests are now used routinely in the U.K., where they are free and “readily available at pretty much every pharmacy in the country.”

The situation is drastically different here because U.S. health officials focused on getting people vaccinated against COVID-19 and never leaned into asymptomatic testing as a strategy to fight the pandemic. While some foreign governments moved quickly to encourage screening and subsidize the cost of at-home tests, the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process moved much more slowly.

….The FDA said it needed to ensure that the tests were accurate, but many scientists countered that the agency was letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Note also that this is a way of saying that the politicians have now also had it with the FDA:

In addition to ramping up production of tests already on the market, the government is also working to speed up the approval process. On October 4, the FDA authorized Flowflex, an at-home antigen test produced by ACON Laboratories that is expected to retail for around $10 per test. And on October 25, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that the FDA will streamline its authorization process, and the National Institutes of Health will spend $70 million on a new program to “establish an accelerated pathway” to aid test makers seeking approval for their products.