Amid a winter surge in coronavirus cases that sparked a nationwide dispute over covid-19 testing last month, as many as 1 million unused rapid test kits expired in a Florida warehouse, a senior state official said Thursday.
Reserves were dormant through the fall when cases fell in Florida and demand was low, Florida Department of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said during a news conference.
The kits, made by Abbott Laboratories, expired “before December 26 to December 30,” Guthrie said, just as the state experienced a wave of new coronavirus cases fueled in part by the highly contagious variant omicron.
For weeks, Floridians have waited hours to get tested, and reports of long lines first surfaced in mid-December, when the fast-spreading omicron variant first appeared in the state.
It is unclear whether Florida could have distributed its excess supply to other states where the tests were in higher demand. The Florida Department of Emergency Management did not immediately respond to Citizen Free Press when asked if the state had considered sharing the tests before they expired.
The US Department of Health and Human Services did not say if there was a national protocol to redistribute unused tests.
State Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, a Democratic candidate for governor in Florida, first revealed on Dec. 30 that she had inside knowledge that the state had a stock of expired test kits that it had not distributed to clinics and providers.
When asked about Fried’s indictment Thursday at a West Palm Beach news conference, DeSantis handed the microphone to Guthrie, who confirmed that between 800,000 and 1 million tests had expired.
Fried responded to the department’s comment on the oversupply, saying in a statement:
“It is bad enough that Governor DeSantis has de-prioritized testing while omicron blew up in Florida, but it is an absolute embarrassment to the governor and his communications team. have lied to and covered up the massive failure of a million unused tests while Floridians wait in lines of hours for local tests that are running out.”
Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations have increased dramatically in recent weeks in Florida. The state averaged 37,563 new cases per day over the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University.
This week, a new report from public health experts at the University of Florida predicted that the latest outbreak will cause many more infections than previous waves, “potentially infecting the majority of the state’s population.”
Guthrie said the state asked the federal government for a three-month extension of the expiration date of expired tests, but has not received a response.
The federal government had already extended the duration of the tests by 90 days, Guthrie said. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not respond to questions from Citizen Free Press about the status of Florida’s application.
DeSantis said that even if the FDA approves an extension to the expiration date of these tests, they may not be as reliable. Abbott Laboratories did not respond to a request for comment.
To ease some of the testing pressure in Florida, DeSantis announced Thursday that his administration will distribute 1 million covid-19 tests at home to assisted living facilities and other elderly care providers.
Biden has pledged to make 500 million tests available to Americans for free, although White House press secretary Jen Psaki said this week that the administration is still finalizing the contracts. DeSantis criticized Biden for not acting faster and suggested that the administration may be struggling to deliver on its promise.
“I don’t know if there is any chance that the federal government will go ahead,” he said.
During Thursday’s press conference at the White House, Psaki played down DeSantis’s comments saying “someone who hasn’t … exactly (been) advocating for people in his state to get vaccinated.”
The governor did not say how his administration acquired the tests, who manufactured them or how much they cost the state. His office did not immediately respond to a request for more details.
DeSantis has downplayed the need to make Covid-19 testing more available to the general public, calling it “not a good use of resources.”