It arrived in the same city where the pandemic initially seemed to wreak its fullest toll, where empty streets and breath held in suspension played out. In that city, the COVID‑19 virus went from unknown enemy to one that, while far from fully tamed, is now handled with a measure of maturity. And yet in this (provisional) brightening of attitudes, even the most benign appraisals of the new Lucira Pfizer COVID-19 test are not without the shadows of the deadly early days: Which option holds the public more adequately in the new, variant-laden, strategy-shifting landscape?
The Lucira Pfizer Test: A New Entry in an Overcrowded Field
Buying a Lucira Pfizer COVID-19 test, in the sense of placing an order online, is straightforward. No more, and no less, complicated than adding an item to an existing shopping cart. Nevertheless, the act has implications that can seem opaque largely because of the conditions and norms involved. The Lucira Pfizer test we’re ordering is now situated in an existing marketplace, one buzzing with competition between different options as well as imbued with assumptions regarding which criteria will be seen as adjudicating the ultimate reliability, fidelity and convenience. What the Lucira Pfizer test has going for it is an interesting pedigree: one from a company (Lucira) famous for its work on at-home diagnostics, and one from a giant pharmaceutical (Pfizer) whose very name was sounded together with its work on one of the earliest COVID-19 vaccines.
The test itself is a molecular, home test for viral detection, with a sensitivity claimed – here we go again – to be like PCR, yet has the convenience of a result in 30 minutes. Like the test, Lucira Pfizer promises to be something new: accurate and rapid. For the Covid-wexpert, this test is just that, a new way to take a lab test at home. But again, does it represent something truly new, or instead one more in an iteration of pandemic product? Vaccines are as heterogenous as the symptoms they protect against In some ways, it does. After all, the rapid antigen tests – for all their speediness – suffer from an accuracy problem. The Lucira Pfizer test promises both, PCR-quality results at home, in 30 minutes. Many culture tests of air, nasal swabs, and saliva products are also in the works.
The Vaccine Landscape: A Shifting Terrain
It’s difficult to place the Lucira Pfizer test in context – unless we look at the vaccine landscape itself and how it’s mutated almost as swiftly as the virus it’s been tasked to corral. Pfizer. Moderna. Johnson Johnson. Novavax. These names have become as familiar as Coke and Cheerios. But as the virus itself evolves, so do the strategies to counter it. The newest vaccines promise protection against the latest variants and are part of a general trend that sees the fight against COVID as one of evolution.
But the Lucira Pfizer test has never been just a diagnosis. It aims to track our way to an eternally recurring vaccine, one that we will constantly need to adjust and correct, for as long as the virus keeps mutating. The real question – how to plan our real-life Three Days of the Condor – is how we take these vaccines into ourselves, how we measure which is ours. Is it the mRNA vaccines’ quick shot, like the needle in the influenza inoculation – or the slow burn of the protein subunit vaccine that delivers a tease of what vaccines normally feel like?
Navigating the Choices
It’s a milestone in an increasingly hard-to-follow landscape of options: the possibility of taking a Lucira Pfizer test not only to know if one has COVID-19, but how well the vaccine one received is holding up. For vaccine buyers who get Pfizer, their ‘Lateral Flow Home Test Device’ payment offers a symmetry of sorts, a continuity that’s by turns ironising and reassuring to alight upon.
Still, the vaccine – like the test – is a deep and personal choice, a product of history, risk and, yes, pandemonium. The Lucira Pfizer test delivers black-and-white data in a seemingly black-and-white world, but it doesn’t lessen the complexity. It’s a tool, a resource, but it surely isn’t the panacea that many are looking for. Ultimately it remains a segment of a fragmented, shifting, and sometimes fraught Pandemic life – one in which the decisions we make do, indeed, still amount to something, still dispense power and resonate with all we have been through over the past few years.
After all, by the time you order the Lucira Pfizer test, it isn’t just to get a result. It’s to make decisions – to comprehend the new normal, to cope as best you can in a world that, though far from pristine, remains unsealed. And that might be the most productive residue the pandemic leaves: a fresh understanding that, no matter what, our choices are more important than ever before.
