The Medical Advisor

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, diagnostic tests of any kind were challenging to find, and their use was generally limited to people showing active signs of infection. The tests had to be administered in a medical facility, and the results could take a week to obtain. Later, a rapid form of the test using nasal cells or saliva could detect the presence of antibodies or antigens within 30 minutes, but the test still had to be administered in a lab or doctor’s office. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  (CDC) have approved several Covid tests for home use, although some still require analysis by an outside laboratory. One of the main selling points of these tests is privacy. If a person needs to know their current status, an at-home test eliminates the need to schedule a doctor’s appointment or stand in line at a busy testing center. At-home Covid tests are becoming more widely available, and it helps to know how...

The Cincinnati Drug and Poison Information Center 1   recently reported an uptick in accidental exposure to a substance in an at-home antigen test kit for COVID-19 that has the potential to lower blood pressure and cause seizures. The reagent in question is sodium azide. Testing and cases have been at the heart of fearmongering designed to change people’s behavior since the early months of 2020. When the news broke from China that a novel coronavirus had been detected, many of the world’s health organizations went into overdrive, ostensibly to protect public health and reduce the number of potential deaths. But, with the passage of time, it’s become glaringly apparent that the public health efforts were ineffective and public health officials were ignoring the science about those efforts. To continue to drive fear, it must be demonstrated that many people are infected with the novel virus, whether they are sick or not. In fact, through the latter months of 2020 and into 2021, it d...