Again, this is another massive Government lie. We have the biggest chemical manufactures in Europe. Robert Preston investigated this claim buy Gove the other day.
See this is why our political debate is screwed. You're getting very angry based on "investigation" that's an unsourced quote from an anonymous source, in response to an unknown question from a political journalist whose only scientific qualification is reading Wikipedia for 5 minutes.
That's not journalism, that's propaganda. If you want to get angry, be angry with the so-called journalists who are manipulating you.
As someone who has actually done some of this stuff for real and has followed the news fairly closely, I can't work out what's happening with the test situation based on the current media. So if I can't, then I'd suggest you don't have enough information to have an opinion one way or the other. But I think you can be sure that all the easy stuff is being done, and smart people are doing their best to do the difficult stuff, anyone suggesting there are easy answers at this stage is just peddling snake-oil.
There does seem to be a specific shortage of swabs, and you can imagine that the rest of the supply chain is being overwhelmed. While the companies have a certain amount of spare capacity it's nothing like what is needed in this unique situation, and there's certainly nobody paying for them to maintain the kind of massive surge capacity that would be needed. But if you think the answer is a phone call to Immingham then you don't understand how this stuff works. Some of these reagents are very specialist, I used to use some enzymes where 1ml cost the price of a small car.
High-throughput genetic screening that can deliver thousands of tests per day is a complex mix of molecular biology and robotics, and there's four main companies in the West that do it - Abbott and Hologic in the US, Roche in Switzerland and Qiagen in Germany (although the holding company is Dutch). None in the UK. So if you're screaming that the UK should ban any exports of PPE and medical kit when our own people need them, then your logic means that we should be cut off from any source of high-throughput testing. We're all in this together.
There are various other companies that make smaller-scale kit but in terms of maximising the productivity of finite trained staff, you need those high-throughput machines. They work on the same business model as computer printers, they have "official" reagents that you can only get from the manufacturer, other reagents may work or they may not, and with lives at stake do you want to take that risk? Or do you have time to test whether the unofficial reagents work properly or not? Particularly when the official documentation for tests specifies exactly what you use - if you ran out of A4 in this example you wouldn't be allowed to just cut up some A3 paper, it would no longer be an official test.
I see zero understanding of those kinds of issues by Peston and can only conclude he's got an agenda or is just utterly out of his depth. He's making a negative contribution right now, so should be ignored.
You should pay more attention to eg the Roche boss, I'd suggest he knows a bit more about it :
"
The sheer demand for tests is vastly outpacing supply" (20 March)
"
at the moment, capacities are limited" (23 March)
