Chantal Vogels studies bugs. A medical entomologist at the Yale School of Public Health, her expertise is mosquitoes, ticks and the nasty viruses they spread. But she went from studying the very small to the very tall as part of a Yale team trying to solve the biggest problem in the United States through an improbable population of research subjects: NBA players. That same Yale team was granted an emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration on Saturday for a product called SalivaDirect, which uses spit instead of swabs to test for the novel coronavirus in people suspected of having Covid-19. FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn called SalivaDirect “groundbreaking” in its efficiency, and Trump administration testing coordinator Adm. Brett Giroir said that it was “yet another testing innovation game-changer that will reduce the demand for scarce testing resources.”

Source: Wall Street Journal August 15, 2020 16:18 UTC