Nancy Messoinnier said yes; the department she worked for says no.
The CDC finally sent a final, yet perplexing, response to a FOIA request I made earlier this year.
I submitted the request in March after reading the transcript for a February 12, 2020 press briefing. During the call, a reporter asked Dr. Nancy Messoinnier, then the Director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), if any of the CDC’s test kits for the “novel coronavirus” were shipped outside of the U.S. and, if so, to which countries.
Messonnier replied, “We have shipped the test kit internationally. I don’t have the specific list of countries in front me.” The last count, she said, was “more than 30 countries.”
I asked the CDC for the names of those countries and the number of tests.
The response? There are no documents pertaining to my request. Further, the agency said, “NCIRD has indicated that orders for tests from various countries were received from various countries but none were sent and the orders were canceled.”
I find that pretty strange, since Nancy Messonnier clearly said, “We have shipped the test kit internationally.”
Admittedly, my requests says SARS-CoV-2 test. Although I referred directly to the transcript – and had some back and forth with the CDC public records officer about the parameters for the search – it’s possible Messonnier was referring to a different test than a SARS-CoV-2 test.
February 12, 2020 was during the time that labs in some states to which the CDC had sent test kits were reporting trouble with validating the tests. Messonnier was asked about this in the same press briefing and said:
When a state gets the test kits, they have to verify that it works the same in their lab that it worked at CDC. And when some states were doing this, we received feedback that they weren’t — that it wasn’t working as expected, specifically some public health labs at states were getting inconclusive results and what that means is that test results were not coming back as false positive or false negatives, but they were being read as inconclusive. Now, these were not tests being run on actual clinical specimens from potential patients. These were part of the verification process, and because of that we are — when we evaluated what the issue is, we think that there might be an issue with one of the three assays and we think that maybe one of the reagents wasn’t performing consistently, so it’s a long story to say that we think that the issue at the states can be explained by one reagent that isn’t performing as it should consistently and that’s why we are re-manufacturing that reagent, obviously a state wouldn’t want to be doing this test and using it to make clinical decisions if it isn’t working as well as perfectly at the state as it is at CDC, so this is part of a normal process and procedure and redoing the manufacturing is the next step.
My investigative interests have taken me away from focusing on the CDC”s alleged test debacle, and I’m not looking to switch my current line of inquiry to go back into the weeds on this topic.
I’m concerned, however, by the apparent mismatch between Messonnier saying tests were shipped and no documents exist pertaining to my request. If the cancellations were due to problems with the same test kits which state labs reported having trouble with, that makes sense.
But if the tests Messonnier seemed confident had been shipped to 30+ countries were tests for something other than the pathogen named SARS-CoV-2, someone should ask her what those tests were for.
Wayback Machine version of original article.
21 March 2026 note: I requested and received additional documents related to this request but lost sight of the issue and haven’t reported on what I received but hope to come back to it in the future.
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