The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science-or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks. The group-working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp-emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. So is an even more extraordinary effort that Kushner oversaw: a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level. Though Kushner’s outsized role has been widely reported, the procurement of Chinese-made test kits is being disclosed here for the first time.
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