
“And so this led to a huge decision to lean heavily on private industry.” “We didn’t have the public health facilities set up to really take part in helping keep the populations in this country safe,” said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. It’s a story rooted in a debilitated public sector that in response to an overwhelming catastrophe opted to relax regulations and place its faith in companies large and small that were ready and able to profit from a once-in-a-century pandemic. County, California and the nation were for what was coming. But the story of how a tiny start-up with an unconventional diagnostic mushroomed into a billion-dollar testing juggernaut illuminates just how unprepared L.A. One year into the pandemic, much of the world has moved on from testing and turned its focus to vaccine supply, including Curative, which is distributing vaccines as it looks to reinvent itself. He boasts that they show his test is better than the standard, uncomfortable nasopharynx test backed by the federal agency - though they have yet to be peer-reviewed or published independently. In a bid to improve his company’s reputation, Turner has submitted to the FDA results of two clinical studies designed and carried out on his own employees in a matter of weeks. Track California’s progress toward that goal. It may have grossed $1 billion or more in taxpayer money and insurance premiums.Ĭalifornia Tracking vaccinations in CaliforniaĮxperts say about most Americans will need to be vaccinated to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control. Led by Fred Turner - a 25-year-old who dropped out of the University of Oxford to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams - Curative had in a year gone from fewer than a dozen employees to servicing mass testing sites such as Dodger Stadium, conducting more than 17 million COVID-19 tests. “You could give them COVID.”Īt a time when the standard COVID-19 test relied on a cotton-swab probe deep inside the nostrils, Curative promised accurate results if people would just cough and swab their mouths - an approach that diverged from established science. “It’s scary,” said Yvonne Myers, the system’s director. Not long after, administrators at a Colorado health system grew skeptical over a string of positive results from Curative and decided to have employees retested by another lab, only to find that the original results were wrong - a so-called false positive, in a healthcare setting where infected patients are kept together, which could expose those who don’t have the virus to those who do. The URL of the Florida Bulldog news site is listed in the article as.

Curative now says DCVC only participated in an earlier funding round. At the time of publication, Curative said that venture capital firm DCVC had participated in an $8.8-million funding round.
