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Not quite accurate. It's not "basically identical". The "moonshot" proposal is that you'd be able to walk up to, say, a cinema entrance and get a PCR test right there which would instantly tell you whether you're +ve for Covid. (Not antibody-positive, but infected/infective-positive.) That's very different from what has been suggested for both the US and UK, which is to have widespread and easy access to PCR testing that could be turned round in, say, 24 hours so that you'd go to a testing station and then be contacted the next day to be told your status. Given the biotech capacity of the UK and US, that sort of testing capacity should have been well within reach in about April. (However because the US decided not to go with the WHO recommendation on what RNA elements to test for, they ran into problems. I can't find out whether this is the same for the UK.) Germany was able to ramp up its testing capacity that quickly and thus didn't get the sort of criticism that the UK and US governments did. The gap between the moonshot proposal and the suggested solution is gigantic. Speed, accuracy, availability - all of them come into it. Plus you also have to ask: why do it, when you have alternatives which could come on stream well before the moonshot tech is developed, in the form of multiple vaccine programs? And why suggest you're going to spend that amount? (£100bn sounds made up, if I'm honest. Why not 10? 50? Because 100 sounds big and round.) So this isn't about media coverage somehow being "partisan horseshit". It really is about a proposal which, given the multiple missed targets and continual lying (about testing capacity, testing times, test facility availability and contact tracing success - all are worse than ministers admit in public statements, but are revealed in data from government departments) from the UK government, simply can't be taken seriously. |