In April, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS) rejected an offer to process approximately 60,000 extra corona tests every day. Which writes NRC, which reconstructed the test capacity expansion since spring. The offer for more testing capacity was made by laboratories in the biotechnology industry.
The ministry confirms to the newspaper that this offer has not been used. This would be because “many other options were already being taken up at that time” and there was more than enough capacity for the testing policy that Minister De Jonge had in mind. It would also have been uncertain whether the capacity would still be available after the summer. Interest association HollandBio, which offered the capacity to VWS, denies to NRC that long-term availability has been discussed.
In June, the international consortium Eurofins also made an offer to expand the test capacity in the Netherlands, but nothing was done about it. The ministry tells NRC that the first contact with Eurofins was only in the second half of August.
In mid-August, the ministry purchased 317 million euros in test capacity from three large labs, including Eurofins. Due to the late switching on of those labs, there was a shortage of test capacity at the start of the second corona wave. In a response, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport tells NRC that “with today’s knowledge it would indeed have been better to contact large-scale laboratories earlier”.
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