Employees at Abbott Laboratories, which does rapid testing of COVID-19, were instructed in June and July to begin destroying BinaxNOW test materials amid declining sales, the New York Times reported.
The BinaxNOW antigen test, which can provide COVID-19 results within 15 minutes, was popular before the pandemic as a way to learn quickly if they had the coronavirus and Abbott once partnered with the White House under the ex President Trump
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Antigen tests are less reliable than PCR tests, which usually provide results in a few days.
The Times reported that rapid test sales fell in the spring as cases began to decline amid a nationwide deployment of vaccines.
A problem from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in May according to which vaccinated people did not need to continue testing even though they had been exposed to COVID-19, with fewer people needing testing.
“The numbers are declining,” a site official, Andy Wilkinson, told employees who were eventually fired in terms of evidence demands. “It’s all about money.”
As a result, hundreds of thousands of test cards used for quick tests were removed, according to some employees who spoke on condition of anonymity to the Times.
However, Abbott now has a new problem: being able to keep up with a renewed demand for rapid testing as the delta variant spreads to vulnerable, unvaccinated communities, creating a further increase in COVID-19 cases. .
The Times reported that Abbott reported that thousands of companies could not provide them with quick tests while struggling to hire workers they had previously let go.
Aly Morici, Abbott’s director of public affairs, told the Times in an emailed statement that it was “difficult to expand by ten cents, but we will do it again” and anticipated that there will be some “restrictions on supply “for the next couple of weeks.
However, there are still questions about why the test cards have been removed.
Abbott CEO and President Robert Ford told the Times in an interview that the test cards were being removed due to their useful life, although the media reported that the photographs they had of test cards released in June and July showed they were not ready to expire for at least seven months.
In a statement following the publication of the Times story, Abbott issued a statement stating that the company had not “destroyed any finished BinaxNOW product nor have we destroyed the marketable usable test components that could have been donated.”
The company argued that it had also chosen to store some of its materials for future use “in case we had to make a backup, which is exactly what is happening now.”