America’s swab supply depends on two cousins who hate each other
The pandemic brought the business opportunity of a lifetime to a small family-owned business in Maine but it was not enough to quell an epic family feud.
A year ago, on Friday, March 13, about 50 government officials and experts met for the first time to talk about a crucial problem: how to test more Americans to determine if they were infected with the novel coronavirus. Jared Kushner stopped by; Mike Pence made an appearance later that weekend. SARS-CoV-2 had spread to more than a 100 countries – Tom Hanks had been infected in Australia – and the US death toll was expected to reach as high as 250,000. Offices, schools, and streets were emptying; stocks were plunging. The NBA had just suspended its season. It was the official start of the global pandemic.
Admiral Brett Giroir, then an assistant secretary for health at the US Department of Health and Human Services, had been put in charge of testing, and he had plenty of concerns. But on that afternoon he was mostly concerned about one essential component of the testing process: swabs. Specifically, the particular six-inch swab flexible enough to sweep the depths of the nasopharynx where the coronavirus replicates, the one now known as the brain tickler, and the only one approved for testing for such respiratory viruses. The US had enough of them to conduct about 8000 tests a day. That was short by three orders of magnitude – the US needed to do millions of tests a day. Kushner told the admiral to secure a billion swabs however he could and then left.
Bloomberg Businessweek
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