Company destroyed parts for millions of covid tests during summer lull
For weeks in June and July, workers at a Maine factory making one of America’s most popular rapid tests for covid-19 were given a task that shocked them: Take apart millions of the products they had worked so hard to create and stuff them into garbage bags.
Soon afterward, Andy Wilkinson, a site manager for Abbott Laboratories, stood before rows of employees to announce layoffs. The company canceled contracts with suppliers and shuttered the only other plant making the test, in Illinois, dismissing a workforce of 2,000. “The numbers are going down,” he told the workers of the demand for testing, saying it wasn’t their fault. “This is all about money.”
As virus cases in the U.S. plummeted this spring, so did Abbott’s covid-testing sales. But now, amid a new surge in infections, steps the company took to eliminate stock and wind down manufacturing are proving untimely — hobbling efforts to expand screening as the highly contagious delta strain rages across the country.
Demand for the 15-minute antigen test, BinaxNOW, is soaring again as people return to schools and offices. Yet Abbott has reportedly told thousands of newly interested companies that it cannot equip their testing programs in the near future. CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens stores have been selling out of the at-home version, and Amazon shows shipping delays of up to three weeks. Abbott is scrambling to rehire hundreds of workers.
America was notoriously slow in rolling out testing in the early days of the pandemic, and the story of the Abbott tests is a microcosm of the larger challenges of ensuring that the private sector can deliver the tools needed to fight public health crises, both before they happen and during the twists and turns of an actual event.
“Businesses crave certainty, and pandemics don’t lend certainty to demand,” said Stephen Tang, CEO of OraSure Technologies, which in the midst of the testing slump in June received emergency Food and Drug Administration authorization for its own rapid test, InteliSwab, long in development. But the company is not yet supplying retail stores.
Meanwhile, Dr. Sean Parsons, CEO of Ellume, the Australian manufacturer of a competitor rapid test, said this week that demand was 1,000 times greater than forecast, and the company was racing to set up a U.S. plant.
Abbott’s decisions have ramifications even beyond the United States. Employees in Maine, many of them immigrants from African countries, were upset at having to discard what might have been donated. Other countries probably could have used the materials, said Dr. Sergio Carmona, chief medical officer of FIND, a nonprofit that promotes access to diagnostics.
“This makes me feel sick,” he said of the destruction, noting that more than a dozen African nations have no domestic funds to buy covid tests.
In an interview, Abbott CEO Robert Ford argued that the discarded materials — finished test cards — should not be viewed as tests. Kits for sale also include swabs, liquid buffer and instructions.
“I would just caution in terms of using the word ‘destroy,’ because it kind of gives a sense here that we’ve got all these tests that were in packages and we threw them away,” Ford said.
Asked why the materials needed to be thrown away, Ford cited a limited shelf life. But photographs of some of the estimated 8.6 million Abbott test cards that employees said were shredded show expiration dates more than seven months away.
Workers had their own conjectures. Some figured layoffs were imminent and there would be no employees left to dispose of the excess, while others thought the company did not want to flood the market and decrease the value of its product: A box of two home tests carries a retail price of $20 to $24.
As for donating BinaxNOW, it is a U.S. product that is not registered internationally, Ford said. “We couldn’t just ship it there.” But he acknowledged that the company did, in fact, send 1 million
tests to India in May, paid for by the U.S. government.
Dr. Mariangela Batista Galvao Simao, an assistant director general at the World Health Organization, said the agency was not made aware of the BinaxNOW surplus. While some countries might have had regulatory barriers, the WHO “would have worked to facilitate whatever is needed.” Donating tests would probably have required considerable extra work for Abbott, she conceded.
The test strip, resembling the one on a pregnancy stick, is less sensitive than polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, but delivers results on the spot, allowing a company or school to take immediate action.
The FDA granted BinaxNOW emergency authorization last August. A day later, the U.S. government announced plans to buy 150 million of the tests for $760 million — $5 a test, plus shipping — to be used in settings such as nursing homes and schools.
Abbott met its initial production goals by keeping manufacturing lines running 24 hours a day and emphasizing speed to an extent that some employees said made them uncomfortable.
On a January conference call, investors learned the hard work was paying off: Abbott had sold $2.4 billion in coronavirus tests, mostly rapid ones, in the final quarter of 2020. “I expect testing demand is still going to remain high, even as the vaccines roll out,” Ford said on the call. “The big point here is the sustainability of this.”
For a while, it appeared he would be right. In March, the federal government announced $10 billion to support testing in schools. By April, Abbott had reaped another $2.2 billion in testing sales. The same month, the FDA extended BinaxNOW’s shelf life, originally six months, to a year.
But then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out with a game-changing announcement: Vaccinated people without symptoms no longer needed to be tested, even after exposure.
The destruction that followed lasted about a month. A list of “lots to be destroyed” appeared on a white board at the plant in Westbrook, Maine, and some of those batches had recently been labeled with new expiration dates.
Several employees, not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, said they were told to eliminate 25 lots of about 345,000 test cards each at the Westbrook factory. Ford would not confirm that number.
Amal Barakat, a virus expert at the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean regional office, shook her head when she heard about the destruction in Maine. “My heart,” she said, “it hurts.”