What's this moon shot gimmick?
Its a mutant propaganda version of some stuff that would actually be a great if it was available at the right time on the right scale with the right degree of accuracy, used in the appropriate ways and not stretched into areas it cannot really safely cover.
If we had a test that was accurate with a quick turnaround time and available on a massive scale then they could do things like give care staff, residents and visitors the amount of routine, regular testing that would be quite a large piece of the infection control puzzle. And the same with hospital staff and patients. And other priority settings. And then if that was all running well with spare capacity you could use it to unlock some options in other realms.
But these potentially desirable options have been clear since near the start. Once the penny dropped with them that all the limitations of our small scale testing based surveillance/survey approach to disease detection and epidemic tracking were going to be very obvious in this pandemic, they were going to end up talking up the alternatives, rather loudly to 'compensate' for the lack of ability to actually deliver these new ways.
Unfortunately since that penny dropped there was always going to be a long period of time featuring unpleasant pandemic events where we could not just magically offer up a system on this scale, or anything close. And they decided to fill much of that time by talking up some of these things, partly to look like they had a plan and partly to offer some false-timescale hope for people to cling to during the vaccine-less void stage of hopelessness in this pandemic.
In the past they spent a nasty part of the first wave talking up the possibilities that mass antibody testing might offer, and then went cold on that idea and stopped going on about it at all. This included stuff like immunity passports that they were happy to let the press go on about despite the obvious flaws with that plan. Sometimes they went so far as to make it sound like anyone would seen be getting a test routinely from various retailers, and yet the hyped up ambitious version of that soon vanished from the picture they were painting in press conferences etc.
I want other forms of quick, reliable testing to be rollled out. It was one of the things I was hoping would be more ready, at least for the hospital, carehome etc scenarios, before the dangerous autumn/winter period got going. And there have been various trials of saliva-based tests, including one I got to participate in that doesnt even seem to get mentioned on the news when they are writing stories about some of the other saliva trials. So I have a big interest in some aspects of what has been incorporated into this Moonshot thing. But now I'll continually have to do work to extract the reasonable, necessary and possible stuff on this front from the version of it the Tories are cooking up.
) that appear while it's attempting to load, then disappear once it has. 
but it's true!
check the 
