Firm’s offer of million tests a week spurned
A MILLION coronavirus tests a week can be delivered by a British company but Public Health England has not taken up the offer, it has been claimed.
Berkshire-based Apacor gained approval from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to supply coronavirus antigen tests and said the first 150,000 could be flown to Britain overnight, amid growing concerns the Government’s 100,000-a-day target was now unreachable. The South Korean test, made by Wells Bio, is already in use in Germany, but the PHE laboratory at Colindale has still not sent for a sample so it can be verified, and says it cannot find time to talk to the company until next week.
Anthony Bell, Apacor’s managing director, said: “Our main product is the global gold standard. We have been waiting for Colindale for two weeks. It’s frustrating because this supplier isn’t some small unknown company. This is the largest manufacturer of some types of tests in the world, and they can do a million tests a week. So we’re waiting. We are ready and able to help. We could do 150,000 tomorrow. They’re sitting in a warehouse, ready.”
The Government has managed just 15,994 tests a day, despite on March 18 setting a target of 25,000 by the middle of April – a target it missed yesterday.
Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, denied at yesterday’s briefing that this target had ever been set, and caused
‘Did they think they could shut for the holidays? Because the virus hasn’t got that memo’
confusion by suggesting there was spare capacity due to a lack of demand at the weekend, even though care homes wrote to the health minister on Friday pleading for tests.
On April 2 Mr Hancock announced a five-pillar strategy, promising to ramp up testing to 100,000 a day by the end of the month. But analysis by The Daily Telegraph’s data team shows the target is highly unlikely to get beyond 20,000.
Last week, Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute, which is helping process NHS tests, said that achieving the target would be difficult.
Other private companies have voiced frustration that offers of help have been ignored by the Government.
Alan Thornhill, of Igenomix, a genetics firm based in Surrey, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he had a team and diagnostic lab “ready and willing” but had little response from the NHS, PHE and health department.
“The tests we were planning to offer are exactly the same that the NHS and Public Health England are using,” he said. “It’s all very chaotic and the truth is everybody wants to help but we’re just not being called.” The firms also say PHE refused to hand over positive samples to validate their tests.
One of their experts said: “It was impossible to get hold of anyone at Colindale over Easter. Did they think they could shut for the holidays? Because the virus hasn’t got that memo.”
Last week Mr Hancock called on the biotech industry to come up with antibody kits after tests bought by the Government were found to be unreliable.
Ancon Medical, based in Canterbury, said it could provide a test that gives a result in 10 minutes, yet had no response from the Government. Wesley Baker, its chief executive, said: “We are incredibly disappointed with the lack of any response from the Department of Health or PHE. If we had access to ICU facilities dealing with Covid-19 patients for one to four weeks to build a chemical breath profile, we could now have been discussing the mass screening of the population.”
The WHO has called on governments to “test, test, test” but Britain has lagged behind. Apacor said it could also get antibody tests from the US but time was short and it feared Britain would end “at the back of the queue”.
♦ medical regulators have approved the first ventilator design since the Government issued a rallying cry to industry to help last month. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency green-lighted a modified design from Oxfordshirebased company Penlon, allowing the group to start rushing the machines into production to treat patients.
The new ventilator has been adapted over the past few weeks as medics gained a greater understanding of coronavirus’s effect on the human body, and how machines need to be able to deal with the disease.