LabGun coronavirus tests from South Korea are unloaded at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport on April 18. The tests, purchased by the state of Maryland for $9.46 million, were flawed and not used. (Maryland governor’s office)
By Steve Thompson, Washington Post
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) spent $9.46 million in state funding to import 500,000 coronavirus tests from South Korea that turned out to be flawed and weren’t used, emails, documents and interviews show.
As it became clear that the much-touted tests could not help detect which Maryland residents had contracted the novel coronavirus, the Hogan administration quietly paid the same South Korean company $2.5 million for 500,000 replacement tests.
The state offered the tests free to two private labs, one of which declined because the tests took much longer to process than U.S. versions, records and interviews show.
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The University of Maryland, which had spent months equipping its lab in Baltimore to process coronavirus tests, abandoned the replacement South Korean tests this fall after a spate of suspected false positives. But the other private lab continues to use them; a state official said Wednesday that 370,000 of the replacement tests have been used.
Hogan heralded the initial purchase as “an exponential, game-changing step forward” and featured it as the climax of his political memoir, published this summer.
“No one knew how many lives those 500,000 tests might save, but it would be a lot,” he wrote of their arrival in April at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. “The successful mission got tons of attention in the national media.”
Local officials in Maryland hoped that the purchase would make screening in the state more widely available. When the tests were not quickly deployed, they — and state lawmakers — began asking what was going on.
But Hogan and his top health and procurement officials withheld the tests’ flaws from the legislature, state spending authorities and the public, according to a review of public testimony and hundreds of pages of emails and other records.
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