Maker of Popular Covid Test Told Factory to Destroy Inventory
Source: New York Times
For weeks in June and July, workers at a Maine factory making one of America’s most popular rapid tests for Covid-19 were given a task that shocked them: take apart millions of the products they had worked so hard to create and stuff them into garbage bags.Soon afterward, Andy Wilkinson, a site manager for Abbott Laboratories, the manufacturer, stood before rows of employees to announce layoffs. The company canceled contracts with suppliers and shuttered the only other plant making the test, in Illinois, dismissing a work force of 2,000.
“The numbers are going down,” he told the workers of the demand for testing. “This is all about money.” As virus cases in the U.S. plummeted this spring, so did Abbott’s Covid-testing sales. But now, amid a new surge in infections, steps the company took to eliminate stock and wind down manufacturing are proving untimely — hobbling efforts to expand screening as the highly contagious Delta strain rages across the country. Demand for the 15-minute antigen test, BinaxNOW, is soaring again as people return to schools and offices. Yet Abbott has reportedly told thousands of newly interested companies that it cannot equip their testing programs in the near future.
CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens locations have been selling out of the at-home version, and Amazon shows shipping delays of up to three weeks. Abbott is scrambling to hire back hundreds of workers. America was notoriously slow in rolling out testing in the early days of the pandemic, and the story of the Abbott tests is a microcosm of the larger challenges of ensuring that the private sector can deliver the tools needed to fight public health crises, both before they happen and during the twists and turns of an actual event.
BinaxNOW, a rapid antigen test made by Abbott, can provide results in 15 minutes.Credit...Abbott, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“Businesses crave certainty, and pandemics don’t lend certainty to demand,” said Stephen S. Tang, chief executive of OraSure Technologies, which in the midst of the testing slump in June received emergency F.D.A. authorization for its own rapid test, InteliSwab, long in development. But the company is not yet supplying retail stores. Meanwhile, Dr. Sean Parsons, chief executive of Ellume, the Australian manufacturer of a competitor rapid test, said this week that demand was 1,000 times greater than forecast and the company was racing to set up a U.S. plant.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/abbott-covid-tests.html
Um well... okay.
This plays into "The pandemic is over!!!111!!!!!!" mentality this past May (and the need for quick but consistent profits).
= new reply since forum marked as read
So I expect once vaccines were available (with Biden's promise to get 100 million vaccine doses out in his first 100 days and ending up with double that), they assumed that was it!!11!!! Pandemic over!!11!!!
And then that probably triggered their final plans for shutting it all down and getting rid of their "excess" product (with the destruction something to write off their taxes as "a loss" ).
Delta didn't become predominate until about June right when they were shutting down.
When planning, obviously you can't factor in every conceivable scenario, but there are some potential outcomes that just scream at you. Low vaccination rates in much of the US and the globe, quickly breeding new mutations is one of those. You'd think a medical device company would be attune to such things. I guess not. What I do know is there a hell of a lot of finger pointing, yelling, nasty emails and folks freshening up their resumes at Abbott right now. The last thing you want in my line of work is management asking you why the hell you couldn't forecast this! Everything looks obvious after the fact, but damn. I've been there and in those situations Japanese ritual suicide seems like a viable option. 
by its other extracurricular activities.
If Chevrolet decided the Impala wasn't selling as good as it had and decided to quit making them, they wouldn't
destroy all the unsold ones in their inventory, they'd go find buyers. I'm gonna take a guess here and assume
they sold for $10 each, that's throwing $80 million dollars down the drain, what company does that? So here's
my conspiracy theory, since some reQublicOns want people to get sick to make Biden look bad or to line their
own pockets behind the curtains.......Was reQublicOn politics at play here???????
Inquiring minds want to know!
What's their shelf life? Wouldn't they receive a tax break for donating? When I remember how people struggled to get tested...
