The government was operating an illegal “British buy-in” policy when it signed contracts with a small UK company to provide Covid’s antibody tests, claiming lawyers who have filed a lawsuit against the health secretary .
The Good Law Project said several other companies were in a better position to provide antibody tests in June and August, when the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) agreed contracts worth up to £ 80m with Abingdon Health without going out to tender.
The government had also agreed to share it in the profits made by the company, the lawyers say.
The government wanted a British test, following a purchase fiasco by health secretary Matt Hancock of Chinese 3.5m antibody tests in March with orders for another 17.5m.
Public Health England decided in April that the Chinese tests were not good enough. Abingdon Health has been invited to develop a trial, as part of a consortium of small UK companies and Oxford University.
The original intention was to let people find out if they had antibodies to coronavirus in their blood, which could be immune to the virus, the lawyers said. They could then “be released from legal restrictions applicable to the population as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic (a policy known as‘ immunization permits ’),” the claim saying.
Part of the government’s testing strategy published this spring was: “A major antibody test to help determine if people are immune to coronavirus.”
The tests were not accurate or reliable enough for that, the lawyers said. Abingdon Health said in the summer that its prick finger antibody test was 99% accurate. But last month, the English Public Health (PHE) assessment of the tests was published in a peer-reviewed medical journal showing true accuracy in the world of less than 85%.
By then, the DHSC had turned its official line on antibody testing, the lawyers say. Following the purchase of the October contract for 1m tests, the department said: “The British antibody testing facilities will support nationwide screening studies to detect Covid-19 distribution in the population.”
Commenting on the publication of the PHE assessment in November, the DHSC said: “They were never expected, and were not issued for widespread public use.”
Stian Westlake, chief executive of the Royal Statistical Society, said the test would be of little use even for surveillance purposes. “The government is proposing the test for the use of vigilance, which requires knowledge of how well the test identifies previously infected people,” he said.
“PHE… evaluated the test for this purpose, and it has shown that it missed more cases and gave more false positive results than the company claims. This means that it is unlikely to be as effective for the purposes of a proposed study. ”
The Good Law Project alleges that the decisions to award the contracts to the British company were unlawfully influenced by nationality. The government also stood to profit from the deal, thanks to a financial settlement giving it a share in the profits of the antibody test if it was sold commercially, according to the claim.
The government said the pandemic was the reason it had to contract for a non-tender antibody test.
“There is a very sensible debate about whether the government should try to pick winners – whether the government should want to buy Britain. There are advantages and disadvantages. But we should get that debate public, ”said Jolyon Maugham, founder of the Good Law Project.
He says that the government has changed their tune on the reasons why it is buying the antibody test.
The government has refused to give an undertaking not to award any other public contracts to Abingdon Health pending the outcome of the case and will not explain its reasons, the lawyers said.
Abingdon Health said there was no mention of it.
The DHSC said it could not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.