Dominic Cummings’ plan to test millions of people a day for coronavirus led the government to spend over £800m on quick turnaround tests that were later found in a pilot to give the wrong results as much as 60% of the time.
Operation Moonshot, a mass testing scheme championed by
Cummings, the prime minister’s former chief adviser, prompted the government to buy huge numbers of so-called lateral flow tests from a company owned by a little-known US private equity house.
Innova Medical Group is now believed to be the largest single recipient of payments from UK government contracts during the pandemic.
More than 380m Innova tests have been bought so far by the UK government.
While
Moonshot has fallen well short of its target of testing 10 million people a day by early 2021, the Innova tests were used to mass-test the city of Liverpool and are now being offered to NHS staff, visitors to care homes, teachers and students. The Department of Health has now secured authorisation for this sort of test to be used for self-testing at home.
Innova secured the contracts, worth a total of
£829m, in the last four months of 2020. Based in California, the group is owned by the equity house Pasaca Capital, which was founded by Charles Huang, a Chinese businessman born in Wuhan who did a PhD at Strathclyde University.
The UK government’s first contract with Innova was agreed on 17 September, before the evaluation of its tests had been completed. Prof Tim Peto of Oxford University, chief investigator for lateral flow tests was asked to evaluate their performance with Public Health England at Porton Down.
The evaluation team found the accuracy of the Innova test was on average 79% when the test was given by lab scientists, 73% when given by health workers and
57.5% when people swabbed and tested themselves.
The Oxford team presented the results of their evaluation of Innova’s tests to
Cummings in late October, with the health secretary,
Matt Hancock, also present. The decision to roll the tests out in a large field pilot as soon as possible was pushed by
Cummings a couple of weeks before he resigned.
Liverpool, where cases had skyrocketed, became the first city to pilot the LFTs for mass testing of people without symptoms. However
the tests in the field missed 60% of infections in people who were self-swabbing. It should be easier to detect infections in people with high viral loads but
the tests missed 30% of those.