UK pays for trusting China : Spends $20 million buying 2 million faulty Coronavirus ‘home test’ kits

The 2 million home test kits bought by the United Kingdom from two Chinese firms, namely, AllTest Biotech and Wondfo Biotech, for a whopping $20 million have now been found to be faulty and insufficiently accurate by a laboratory at the Oxford University.

The deal was risky since the reliability of such a technology was not established. The Government had to pay the money upfront in 24 hours and collect the crates of test kits from a Chinese facility. This was supposed to be a game-changer for the UK which has come under fierce criticism for its ‘slow response’ to the Coronavirus pandemic.

However, the British officials were somehow convinced that it would work. Their enthusiasm motivated them to even promise that such kits would be available in pharmacies within 2 weeks. Now, that the Chinese test kits have been found as unreliable, they have been left unused in the storage.

A government official informed that they are is now trying to recover some of the money from the firms. Health officials have defended the move by labelling the mishap as a valuable experience. Professor of Virology at the University of Surrey said, “You can’t lift the lockdown as long as you are not testing massively. As long as the government is not testing in the community, we are going to be on lockdown.”

Britain has been conducting less than 20,000 tests per day but has promised to up the ante to 1,00,00 by the end of April. The UK has complained about the lack of major private testing companies that can help health officials perform thousands of diagnostic tests in a day, unlike Germany and the US.

The Chinese firms have blamed the British officials for not being able to comprehend the utility of the test kits. According to researchers, the test kits ordered by the UK were more complicated and inaccurate than the lab tests. The World health organisation (WHO) had warned on April 8 about the limited utility of such rapid antibody testing kits for patients.