Florida Officials Let Nearly 1 Million COVID Tests Expire In Spite Of Rising Infections

Salvador Hernandez
·3 min read

A stockpile of as many as 1 million COVID-19 tests sat unused in a Florida warehouse and have expired, Gov. Ron DeSantis admitted Thursday as the state and the rest of the country are facing a steep demand for tests and a surge of new infections.

The governor's office had previously brushed off questions about the stockpile's expiration, but when asked during a press conference Thursday, the state's Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie admitted that somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million tests had expired at the end of the year.

"We tried to get them out," Guthrie told reporters. "But there was not a demand for it."

Yet last week, Floridians reportedly waited up to three hours to get a COVID-19 test as cases and potential exposures spiked due to the more infectious Omicron variant. And on Dec. 21, officials in the state's most populous county, Miami-Dade, reportedly asked state officials to send any available tests to meet the spiking demand.

"We are asking that all possible tests that come through the state for distribution be allocated to Miami-Dade given the surge in demand in our community for testing options," a spokesperson for the county mayor's office told Local 10.

DeSantis on Thursday said tests were being sent out to local jurisdictions as requested. Demand for COVID tests had slowed down in September, when the tests in the stockpile were first set to expire, he added.

"There was no withholding of anything," the governor told reporters.

State officials at that time requested permission from federal health officials to extend the use of the tests for three more months, Guthrie said. That request was granted, but still the tests sat unused and expired between Dec. 26 and Dec. 30.

Florida officials have now requested another three-month extension to use the tests, but they have yet to receive an answer from the manufacturer and federal officials, Guthrie said.

"The thing is, if they're not authorized, if they're not accurate, we don't want to send inaccurate tests," DeSantis said.

The existence of the unused tests became public when Florida agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried put out a statement about them, pointing out they were about to expire.

"Given the Governor's lack of transparency throughout this pandemic, there's no known public information about these tests or how soon they expire," she said on Dec. 30 in a statement. "With omicron infections exploding throughout Florida, I beg of him to release these tests immediately to local counties and cities, and to stand up state-sponsored testing sites. To let these tests expire while Floridians anxiously wait for hours in testing lines is negligent at best, and heartless at worst."

Fried, a Democrat, is currently running for governor.

DeSantis's office at first brushed off questions about the tests, with his spokesperson Christina Pushaw telling a local NBC 2 reporter that Fried's allegation was "bizarre."

After DeSantis admitted Thursday the tests had expired, Pushaw then inaccurately tweeted that the tests had expired before the Omicron surge, leaving out that an extension of their use had been authorized.

Fried, in turn, accused DeSantis and his office of lying and now attempting a cover-up.

"The governor of the third largest state lied to you about COVID tests," she tweeted. "When we caught him, he used your tax dollars to come after me for telling you the truth."

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