What Do I Know?14 Nov 2020 05:04
Scathing article in Daily Mail on £42B
Operation Moonshot.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8947595/DAVID-ROSE-42BILLION-Operation-Moonshot-test-trace-plan-actually-work.html
The lynchpin of Boris Johnson's mass testing scheme Operation Moonshot is American company Innova Medical.
Formed in 2017 by private equity group Pasa Capital, its two contracts – to supply nearly 200million pregnancy test-style 'lateral flow' kits – are worth some £440million.
So how did it end up with enormous contracts to supply the British Government?
The answer lies in a terrace house in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, the residence and office of Kimberley Thonger, 61, director of Disruptive Nanotechnology Ltd – whose last accounts, published in 2019, say it then had no reserves and debts of £2,368.
Mr Thonger once worked for DKNY shoes and Dr Marten's and never previously had anything to do with healthcare.
In June he took on a co-director, Charles Palmer, 52, a surveyor who runs a property business in Harrow – the pair are understood to be friends.
Innova CEO Dan Elliott says he came across Mr Thonger through an organisation which deals with nanoparticles which are used in medicines. He agreed to help Innova negotiate the bureaucracy and trials it had to go through to win its Government deal.
Mr Thonger and Mr Palmer are the UK distributors of the Innova tests and will get 'a few pence' for every test sold – which will total millions.
Following a pilot in Liverpool, the Government is distributing millions of new, rapid turnaround tests to 67 towns and cities, and to university students before they go home for Christmas.
While the Government published an evaluation of these pregnancy-style 'lateral flow' tests, made by Innova, it has not released data on 50 further rapid result Covid tests it has also investigated. So it is impossible to know whether it is the best available. Professor Pillay says that, true to form, the virologists have not been consulted over these tests.
He warns: 'Government data suggests that if it isn't being administered by healthcare workers, this test isn't very sensitive. Among people with no symptoms, you could miss 40 positive cases of out of 100. Some positives will be people whose infectiousness is declining. But others will not test positive because they've only recently been infected. A day or two after the test, they could be highly infectious.'
Another of the technological breakthroughs ministers are setting store by is the speedy Optigene LAMP test. It is made by a tiny company in Horsham, West Sussex, which, as the Mail revealed last month, now has a £387million contract to supply 600 devices.
Preliminary tests on Optigene conducted by Manchester University suggested it detected only 47 per cent of positive cases in 'real world' – as opposed to lab – settings.
Professor Pillay sighed. 'What do I know? I've only spent 40 years studying and fighting viruses.
Test, test, test
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