We can meet 100,000 daily target, says American firm

A UNITED STATES company claims it is on track to deliver Matt Hancock’s target of 100,000 coronavirus tests every day by the end of the month.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, based in Massachusetts, said it had the capacity to deliver all the tests needed to hit the Health Secretary’s ambitious target set last week.

The company has signed a major deal with the Government to ramp up tests at a super-lab in Milton Keynes, and said it would work around the clock to hit the deadline.

In recent weeks, the Government has faced heavy criticism as Britain’s mass testing programme continues to lag far behind other nations including Germany and South Korea.

In response, Mr Hancock last week launched a five-pillar strategy to increase testing in the UK to 100,000 every day by the end of the month.

The Daily Telegraph revealed yesterday how NHS leaders told Mr Hancock during a frank conference call on Wednesday that their current testing targets would be “jam tomorrow” without significant outside help.

Mark Stevenson, chief operating officer at Thermo Fisher Scientific, said his firm alone could deliver the target by the end of April.

The firm will also initially produce antigen tests to tell people whether they have the virus.

Mr Stevenson told the BBC: “We began mobilising actually straight away after we learnt about the Covid-19 outbreak and we designed the kit to identify the virus’s unique genetic code.

“Then we worked in a way to test that, validate that in patients. And then we began to scale up our manufacturing to meet demand.

“We agreed with the UK that we would supply to meet their demand of more than 100,000 tests per day.”

Mr Stevenson said the kits were currently produced outside the UK but the firm had agreed to use its UK bases to produce kits for local supply.

“Here in the UK we have about 5,000 employees and about 26 sites, so we already have a very large presence,” he said.

Mr Stevenson said Amazon was involved in moving the test kits from the firm’s bases to UK testing centres.