Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for attending this morning. I have used the word "frustration" a number of times at meetings of this committee. I am deeply frustrated today, and I will state why. Doctors differ and patients die. We are talking about tracing and so on when testing is the key. Rapid turnaround testing would do an awful lot to prevent a surge of Covid. I brought antigen tests to NPHET almost eight weeks ago and nothing has been done with them. On television last night, we saw the US President, Mr. Donald Trump, announcing a plan for 150 million antigen tests. There were another 15 million from a company about which I informed NPHET. NPHET has decided to look away from antigen tests.

We saw this morning that Vienna is considering LAMP technology, which Professor Tomás Ryan brought to this committee six weeks ago. It has not been pursued. I am referring to rapid turnaround tests that are far cheaper than what we are using. They would give us scope to chase down contacts at a very early stage and to begin testing for asymptomatic cases – random testing – in the HSE environment and in community care to ensure workers are not transmitting disease. We cannot seem to go forward. Dr. Henry has answered this question before and has spoken about specificity and the positivity rate of polymerase chain reaction, PCR, testing by comparison with other methods, but the tests to which I am referring are approved by the WHO. Why in the name of God are we not trying to pursue these testing applications? We are running around spending hundreds of millions of euro when we could be spending tens of millions with far more effective outputs?