The POC (point-of-care) diagnostics market stands at about $18.8 billion globally, according to recent market trends, and is expected to grow by a third to $24.1 billion this year and projected to explode by 2024 to $46.7 billion. The main driver for these highly optimistic forecasts is the surge in healthcare technology demand brought on by the pandemic crisis, which is lining the pockets of big pharma and big tech, aided and abetted by the Defense Department's various tentacles into the private sector, like DARPA or In-Q-Tel, where federal dollars are channeled into private enterprise through direct investment, stock purchasing, and grants, representing one of the clearest examples of how the military industrial complex works.

The "detection" of COVID-19 is among the most crowded segments of the POC diagnostics market and recent advances in the life sciences have made new technologies, such as mRNA-based vaccines and testing possible. The U.S. government, through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has been intimately involved in helping these technologies along, and in the case of mRNA, specifically, has made considerable investments in its development dating back to November 2019 in the case of one company developing an mRNA-based COVID-19 diagnostic tool.

But in a paper published o