The US Department of Defense (DOD), in cooperation with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has granted four contracts worth $647m to buy over-the-counter Covid-19 test kits.
Supported by the DOD’s Defense Logistics Agency and Defense Assisted Acquisition Cell, the purchases have been funded via the American Rescue Plan Act to supply critical medical resources to the country.
The contracts have been awarded to four companies by the DOD for the supply of over-the-counter Covid-19 test kits.
OraSure Technologies has secured a $205.2m contract from the DOD to supply over-the-counter Covid-19 test kits, while Quidel received a $284.2m contract to provide 25.6 million over-the-counter Covid-19 test kits.
Abbott Rapid DX North America has secured a $47.8m contract from the DOD to supply 3.8 million test kits.
Intrivo Holdings has secured a $109.8m contract from the DID to distribute 10 million over-the-counter Covid-19 test kits.
All the companies will begin the distribution of test kits from October this year and intend to complete the supply of test kits by September next year.
Recently, the DOD awarded a $35.8m contract to Mettler-Toledo Rainin to increase domestic production capacity of pipette tips for both manual and automated laboratory procedures.
The Rainin pipette tips are said to be key consumable for both COVID-19 research and testing of collected samples and other critical diagnostic activities.
With industrial base expansion effort, Rainin is expected to expand its production capacity of pipette tips by 70 million tips per month by January 2023.
In October last year, Cue Health secured a $481m contract from the DOD for the expansion of its production capacity and deploy six million molecular, point-of-care Covid-19 tests by March this year.
