Government test tsar has £770k shares in f irm that sold us £13m of ‘pointless’ kits
After it emerged Boris’s science guru has a f inancial interest in company racing to find vaccine, we reveal...
A TOP Government adviser on Covid tests is a shareholder in the Swiss drugs firm that sold the UK millions of ‘pointless’ antibody screening kits, a Mail on Sunday investigation has found.
Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, holds more than £773,000 worth of shares in Roche, the pharmaceutical company that made the kits.
He was also on the company’s board as a non- executive director, but stood down in March.
In early May, the Government agreed to buy £13.5 million of Roche’s antibody tests, which the firm said were ‘ 100 per cent accurate’. Sir John states he played no role in the decision.
There are two types of Covid test. Diagnostic tests tell patients if they currently have the virus, while antibody tests – like the Roche one – reveal if a person has antibody cells in their immune system that prove they had it in the past.
Following the deal, Sir John appeared on Channel 4 News and Radio 4’s Today programme calling the tests a ‘major step forward’ – but did not mention his links to the firm.
However, studies revealed that antibodies for Covid-19 quickly wane, and so testing for them reveals little. At the time of the Roche deal, Sir John said: ‘If you test positive with this test, you can say for certain you have had the infection so you will have had Covid-19.’
The news comes days after it emerged the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, a former president of British drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline, still has a £600,000 shareholding in the firm which is currently involved in developing Covid vaccines. Health Secretary Matt Hancock told LBC radio that Sir Patrick, who also chairs the Government’s expert panel on vaccines, ‘abided by the rules’.
After the Roche contract was signed, a Public Health England (PHE) evaluation found the tests may not be reliable, so plans to make them available to NHS and care workers were dropped.
Jon Deeks, professor of biostatistics at Birmingham University, called the tests ‘pointless’.
Sir John told The Mail on Sunday he disagreed with the PHE evaluation but admitted ‘the Government has no real use for antibody tests right now’. Asked if he’d declared his interests in Roche to the Government, Sir John said: ‘Of course they knew – the Department of Health has a long list of my interests.’
He said that he did not sit on the advisory body i nvolved i n the decision to purchase the Roche antibody tests, adding: ‘I did not know about the Roche contract until it was signed. I advised on [ diagnostic] home- testing kits, not these ones.’
While on the board of Roche, he received a salary of £260,000. He announced his decision to step down in December, but held on to his shares in the company, worth £773,000. The Oxford professor has worked as an adviser to the Department of Health and Social Care since 2017 in a variety of roles. Under former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt he helped explore ways the Government could work with drugs companies such as GlaxoSmithKline. Among his numerous high profile appointments, he also sits on the board of Genomics England, a Government- funded company set up and funded by the Department of Health and Social Care to sequence 100,000 genomes from NHS patients. Since March he has been chairman of the Government’s New Test Approvals Group, which assesses virus diagnostic tests.
‘There’s no real use for antibody tests right now’