He and others argued that comparing the tests with the “gold standard” of laboratory-based PCR tests, which detect viral RNA, missed the point. “Those who were criticising it were seeing it as a clinical diagnostic tool, not a public health tool,” he said. We even received death threats.”īuchan and others saw things differently. “It was almost a religious argument about whether you were for lateral flow testing or not. “We were being attacked left, right and centre,” said Prof Iain Buchan, the chair in public health and clinical informatics at the University of Liverpool, who led the pilot. The results were controversial, with a vocal group of scientists warning that reliance on LFTs to open up schools and the economy risked providing false reassurance. ![]() However, the tests in the field missed 60% of infections in people who were self-swabbing, and even in those with high viral loads 30% of cases were missed. This time the government fast-tracked a pilot of community testing of about 125,000 people in Liverpool using Innova’s lateral flow antigen test, and found that 897 people who did not know they had the virus tested positive and were stopped from spreading it further. Photograph: Maureen McLean/Rex/Shutterstock It’s been one of the more heroic moments of the pandemic.”Ī sign in the window of a Boots store in Windsor this week. “But the reality is that lateral flow tests have delivered. “Whenever I hear the word ‘moonshot’ from No 10 my heart sinks,” Bell said. The UK government had also moved on to Operation Moonshot, which aimed to deliver millions of these kits to people’s homes. The government established a group of Porton Down scientists, chaired by Bell, to validate tests for use.īy early autumn 2020 many companies had switched their focus to antigen tests, which use synthetic antibodies to detect proteins from the virus itself. The orders were quietly cancelled, and Bell said one valuable lesson was the need for a robust validation process. ![]() ![]() ![]() That was the starting point for lateral flow tests.” (He noted that Surescreen’s test was not among these.) “There were a lot of people running around trying to sell tests that didn’t work trying to make a fast buck. “They absolutely didn’t work – they were awful,” said Prof Sir John Bell, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University. At the time governments optimistically – and wrongly – hoped that proof of prior infection could act as a “freedom pass” allowing people to return to life as normal in the knowledge that they were immune to the virus.īy April 2020 the UK government had announced the purchase of 17.5m lateral flow testing kits, describing them as a “gamechanger”. The first Covid lateral flow tests were designed to detect antibodies. We thought initially that it would be a niche product.” “We’d done a lot of work on influenza and some work on Mers. “We started thinking about it in late 2019 when we were at international trade shows where it was becoming a hot topic,” said David Campbell, the director of the Derby-based diagnostics company Surescreen, which has been in the lateral flow business for more than 25 years and brought one of the first antigen tests in Europe to market.
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