Covid Clinic Runs Into Trouble With Antibody Tests In San Diego

The Covid Clinic is an Orange County based effort that is helping to test greater Malibu residents fo the disease.

Along with the city and CORE … the relief effort headed by actor Sean Penn … the Covid Clinic is offering the nasal swab tests … which can give results that indicate if a person currently has the virus.

But the nasal tests cannit say if a person has HAD the virus … an important question.

For that … you need a blood antibody test.

The COVID clinic is nit offering antibody tests in Malibu.

But it is offering antibody tests in San Diego County … and it has been ordered to stop offering the antibody tests by San Diego County health department officials.

COVID Clinic failed to provide a certification that its lab was properly certified for the blood anitbody tests.

The county also COVID Clinic had not provided validation data to prove that its blood antibody test actually works as designed.

And an an infectious disease researcher with Scripps Research in La Jolla voiced concerns that the COVID Clinic was handing out literature at the Cardiff testing site that indicated a positive antibody test result meant the “risk of contracting COVID again is nearly 0%.”

Doctor Thomas Rogers told channel 8 news in San Diego that the antibody tests “are not in any way informative and they’re falsely reassuring, which makes them dangerous.”

COVID Clinic has been kicked off of its site in San Diego County by the community college that owns it … and the sheriff has vowed to shut it down.

The nasal tests that COVID clinic was offering in both San Diego and Malibu are not at issue in the San Diego enforcement action.

San Diego officials  said the nasal tests are analyzed at a certified lab in Texas.

But the blood antibody tests apparently have real accuracy problems.

According to documentations provided by Covid Clinic to the San Diego Union-Tribune…. the blood antibody test turns up a false positive result 6 percent of the time.

Negative results appear to be accurate 99 point 1 percent of the time.

But the newspaper took the test results to the editor of the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases … a professor at U C San Diego.

He found the test data lacking and worrisome.

Again … the questions that were raised about Covid Clinic in San Diego are over its blood antibody test … which was originally advertised as available in Malibu …. but apparently never offered.

The federal government has only authorized one blood antibody test …. but numerous companies are rushing blood antibody test to the public under the emergency authority granted by the federal government.

San Diego Union-Tribune: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2020-04-15/county-shuts-down-pop-up-testing-center