that s right. so the thing that was compelling to me about this story is that although dr. bosh was very open about the process that she went through she wasn t the only one, there were many large companies making these tests and selling them in other countries but they couldn t get through none of them could get through the fda with the standard that was promulgated for home tests especially in late july of 2020. so it took until december of 2020 for a single over the counter home test to be authorized and those didn t go into production in the u.s. for months and now they still cost $40 each, and the two most well-known tests we know today, the abbott s buy max now and the quick view tests were authorized until late march of 2021 when it became the fda said that you can use these in a serial manner, like two at a time or two in a row. so that was at a time when we thought that vaccines were
hundreds of thousands of more children are going to need to get tested this week. where are they even going to get these tests? reporter: well, the state has provided some, so the governor has said she is going to be sending a million at home rapid test kits to new york city schools, there are two tests in each kit so that s about two million tests. new york city it is the nation s largest school district, you have 1.1 million children who are at school in new york city public schools. the city has said they have about 6 million testing kits on hand, but you have teachers unions like uft who have said they are appreciative and glad that the state has sent the city additional kits specifically for schools but they say having those kits and effectively distributing them and ensuring that every single school close to 2,000 of them in new york city has equal access to those tests is a very different thing and so far that union at least they ve said that they are not convinced that that c
small startup in cambridge, massachusetts, at the beginning of the pandemic. they had been making tests for tropical diseases very similar to the ones that you see today, simple lateral flow tests and they found that their technology could be adapted pretty quickly for the new coronavirus. so they whipped up a pretty quick and dirty prototype, brought it to the fda and they said this works and the fda said we need you to do more things to prove it. so they had to spend months doing clinical trials and by the time they brought their application to the fda again later in the fall the fda said this isn t sensitive enough and it s not specific enough, and that is how the fda was treating these rapid tests, as something that really needed to be extremely accurate. the point that dr. bosh was trying to make is that very early in the pandemic especially these are tools that could be used because they are very sensitive for folks who have
really going to get us out of this pandemic quickly. the other failure here is that the white house didn t emphasize testing in a way that would have led them to buy hundreds and millions of these tests to make sure that companies had the certainty to keep producing them. that, i think, is a twin failure that has led us to the shortages we are experiencing today. and hundreds of millions of tests are exactly what we need right now. thank you so much for joining. really great reporting. thank you. coming up, the nfl s antonio brown torches his latest second chance. the question is will it be his last? the wild walk out that has everyone wondering what was behind it and could that have been his last game? nd it and co been his last game got my brains got my ears got my heart got my soul got my mouth i got life - realtor.com s new collaboration tools made it easy for romeo and i to find the right home together.
we can do serial testing of someone who is positive, the quicker they are negative and can be back to their normal life. all of that i think will make testing something that becomes part of our life once we get enough supply. it s the supply constraint that hampers the way we have used these tests. they ve been been valued for what they can be able to do in the face of this pandemic. i do want to ask you this, the fda may soon allow pfizer boosters for kids between the age of 12 and 15. you have said to us even in the last couple of weeks that you do not see a need for boosters unless people are at high risk. so what do you think about this move? would you get your 12-year-old boosted? i don t have any children, but if my child was high risk, meaning immunocompromised, had congenital heart disease, a transplant, yes, i would get them boosted, if they had asthma. for the average healthy 12 to 15-year-old, for the average healthy adult i still think that boosters provide a transient