Britain is looking to get its money back after buying some coronavirus antibody tests to trial them only to find that none of the products worked reliably enough, a British health official said on Wednesday.
Health minister Matt Hancock last week that Britain wanted to buy 17.5 million antibody tests, subject to them working, but none of the test have proven fit for purpose.
SEVERAL COUNTRIES HAVE PURCHASED FAULTY KITS FROM CHINA
“The test developed in China was validated against patients who were severely ill,” Professor John Bell, coordinator of coronavirus testing for Public Health England, told reporters. “Whereas we want to use the test in the context of a wider range of levels of infection….So for our purposes, we need a test that performs better than some of these other tests. We see many false negatives… and we also see false positives. This is not a good result or test suppliers or for us.”
UK has become the latest European nation to report on unreliable medical equipment shipped from China. In late March, the Czech Republic announced that up to 80 percent of 150,000 coronavirus test kits purchased from China were faulty.
Spain was also forced to scrap a shipment of test kits from China after finding that the tests accurately detected coronavirus cases only 30 percent of the time.
