Abbott Labs Boosts Production Of BinaxNOW Rapid COVID-19 Tests
NORTH CHICAGO, IL — As demand for COVID-19 testing skyrockets during the omicron surge, officials at Abbott Labs hope to soon be making twice as many BinaxNOW rapid test kits as the company produced at peak during previous waves of the coronavirus pandemic.
Robert Ford, Abbott's chief executive officer, attributed the difficulty for consumers in finding his company's tests to a convergence of two factors.
"We see, obviously, a new variant, a pretty highly transmittable variant, in combination with a period of the year where there's a lot of travel — Thanksgiving and Christmas, people wanted to get together," Ford said Thursday during an interview with Bloomberg TV. "So the combination of those two factors really had a pretty unprecedented demand here."
Abbott first received emergency use authorization for BinaxNOW rapid coronavirus test kits in August 2020. At the time, the company said they would be available for $5, although they were not initially available for home use. By the time the tests were authorized for at-home use in December 2020, the price tag was $25. Ford said the company produced as many as 50 million tests a month during 2021.
"We saw cases go down in the beginning of 2021, so we had to ramp down our manufacturing," Ford said. "But as delta resurged her in the US, we've quickly re-engaged our manufacturing, we're back to 50 million. This month we'll do 70 million, and I'm working with my team every day to see if I can get us to 100 million."
The company previously announced that it had recently reopen its Gurnee manufacturing facility, which shut down last summer, as well as adding new machines to automate parts of the manufacturing process and hiring more workers in Maine. Company representatives said in November that Abbott was already producing more than 50 million BinaxNOW tests a month with the potential for an increase.
"Supply chain is tough," the CEO said. "It's tough for a lot of companies across all different sectors, right? But we've make sure to manufacture our tests here in the US, so we've built three factories here in the US just to do COVID tests, so that we had a little bit more control of our supply chain."
Ford said Abbott company officials were doing everything possible to ensure that the test kits do not go to waste.
The pledge came the same day director of the state of Florida's Emergency Management Division admitted that between 800,000 and 1 million BinaxNOW rapid testing kits expired last month after they were left in a warehouse, saying state officials had been unable to give them out in time.
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This article originally appeared on the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Patch
