A tender that allows the government to increase the analysis capacity for hundreds of thousands of corona tests this fall tries to arrange, can still go ahead with a month’s delay. An Austrian laboratory tried to have the procedure changed through summary proceedings, but that objection was rejected by the court in The Hague.
According to the Novogenia lab, it is unfair that only two large laboratories will be contracted by the Netherlands this autumn. The rest of the corona test market will go to various smaller Dutch laboratories according to the tender procedure.
According to the judge, it has been made sufficiently plausible that with other procurement rules there would be a chance of “an impoverishment of the test landscape” and that constitutes “a risk in the fight against the corona pandemic”. The objection is therefore turned down.
Power struggle
Playing in the background of the summary proceedings a power struggle for the millions of euros involved in the market for diagnostics, including the lucrative corona tests. Smaller labs want to maintain their position within the Netherlands, while large, mostly foreign companies are only too happy to enter the market.
According to the tender documents, the labs that will soon be contracted for the analysis of corona tests that are taken at the GGD may declare 30 to 50 euros per test. Up to 92,000 tests per day can be analyzed by dozens of labs. If the entire tender is used, it will cost the government almost 2 billion euros.
The contracts with the new test labs will probably be awarded at the end of this month. They will run until December 31, but can be extended until September 2022. “Testing is expected to remain part of the fight against the pandemic for a long time to come,” a government lawyer said during the hearing of the summary proceedings.
The lawyer of the Austrian Novogenia says that the company is disappointed with the ruling. The lab will leave it at that and will no longer compete for part of the Dutch corona test market.
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