The British government has ordered millions of coronavirus tests made in China that do not work, Public Health England’s Professor John Newton has admitted.
Professor Newton, the government’s new testing chief, said that while some of the Chinese tests could identify immunity in those who had been very sick, all of the tests had failed the minimum thresholds set for the trials. They “are not good enough to be worth rolling out in very large scale”, he said.
“The test developed in China was validated against patients who were severely ill with a very large viral load, generating a large amount of antibodies… whereas we want to use the test in the context of a wider range of levels of infection including people who are quite mildly infected,” Prof Newton said in comments reported by The Times.
“So for our purposes, we need a test that performs better than some of these other tests,” he added.
This is not the first time that China-made tests for the Chinese coronavirus have proven faulty. Late last month, Spain, the country with the second-highest number of fatalities and the highest number of cases in Europe, bought thousands of faulty antibody testing kits from China’s Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology. Chinese authorities claimed that Spain had purchased the tests, which were EU-certified, from a supplier that was not recommended by the Chinese state. – READ MORE
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