On July 30, as part of an ongoing collaboration between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the two departments awarded a contract for $24.3 million to Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) to establish and expand domestic production of SARS-CoV-2 rapid point-of-care (POC) tests used for COVID-19 testing on the BD Veritor™ Plus analyzers.
The assays produced by BD for the BD Veritor™ Plus instruments are critical for performing antigen testing to detect COVID-19 infection, as the pandemic has driven an unprecedented demand for diagnostic testing. More than 25,000 BD Plus Veritor™ instruments exist in the U.S. in urgent care centers, physician offices, acute care facilities and other health care locations. This investment in equipment procurement and facility renovations will support the establishment and expansion of COVID-19 test production in California, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts for U.S. consumption, with an initial manufacturing scale-up to 4 million tests per month by the end of September 2020, and subsequent scale-up to enable a final production rate of 8 million tests per month by the end of February 2021.
This CARES Act funded effort has been led by the DOD’s Joint Acquisition Task Force (JATF), in coordination with HHS and the Department of the Air Force’s Acquisition COVID-19 Task Force (DAF ACT), and will enable and support industrial base expansion for critical medical resources.