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Center for Health Security senior scholar Dr. Gigi Gronvall briefs US House of Representatives subcommittee on COVID-19 antibody testing

June 9, 2020 – Gigi Gronvall, PhD, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering and the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, provided testimony at a congressional subcommittee briefing on COVID-19 antibody testing.

The video briefing, “COVID-19 Antibody Testing: Uses, Abuses, Limitations, and the Federal Response,” was convened by the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy.

Dr. Gronvall shared an overview of key findings on antibody testing to date and provided 4 recommendations for the US government to act on:

1. The quality of antibody tests should be clear to purchasers; independent validation study results should be public information.
    
2. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should coordinate the serosurveys across states and public health departments and develop a common protocol for states to use.
    
3. The US government should create a central repository for serosurveys, similar in function to ClinicalTrials.gov, which is a database of privately and publicly funded clinical trials.
    
4. Large employers/universities using antibody tests should be strongly encouraged to register their studies in the central repository.

“Though there are important short-term questions necessary to answer to get this disease under control that require antibody testing, we need to be mindful to prepare to collect the information needed to be able to address these long-term issues, as they will likely remain for many years to come,” explained Dr. Gronvall.

Read the full testimony. (PDF)

Watch the testimony.