The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blocked an official from the Food and Drug Administration from one of its campuses, Politico reports.
According to Politico, Timothy Stenzel, the director of the Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health at FDA, arrived at CDC's Roybal campus on the evening of Saturday February 22, but was unable to gain entry until the following day, even though his visit was expected. Stezel was there, it adds, to help move along CDC's efforts to develop lab tests for SARS-CoV-2 that is causing the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.
Earlier in February, FDA granted emergency use authorization to enable other labs to use a SARS-CoV-2 testing kit CDC developed, but a number of labs encountered issues with the kit when conducting during quality control testing. CDC said it needed to re-manufacture one of the kits' reagents.
CDC tells Politico that Stenzel wasn't expected to arrive until Sunday and was not allowed on campus because of security procedures. Politico notes that Stenzel was allowed on campus on Sunday and that during his visit, he uncovered lab contamination issues — which he reported to the Department of Health and Human Services — that it says may have contributed to the problems with the testing kits.