UKHSA claims Immensa lab errors may have led to 23 Covid-19 deaths

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) made the claim in a report into errors at the Immensa lab in Wolverhampton. It said as many as 39,000 positive results were wrongly reported as negative in September and October 2021. The mistakes led to “increased numbers of [hospital] admissions and deaths”, the report, published on Tuesday, concluded.

Thousands of people, many in the South West, were wrongly told to stop testing after their results were processed by Immensa. The Wolverhampton laboratory was used for additional testing capacity for NHS Test and Trace from early September 2021, but testing was suspended on 12 October following reports of inaccurate results.

UKHSA experts said the mistakes could have led to as many as 55,000 additional infections in areas where the false negatives were reported.

Immensa was paid more than £100m to carry out Covid testing for the NHS during the pandemic and about 400,000 samples had been processed at the lab in Wolverhampton.

Richard Gleave, UKHSA director and lead investigator, said: "We have concluded that staff errors within Immensa’s Wolverhampton laboratory were the immediate cause of the incorrect reporting of Covid-19 PCR test results in September and October 2021.

“It is our view that there was no single action that NHS Test and Trace could have taken differently to prevent this error arising in the private laboratory.”

23 dead, 55,000 infections and £100,000,000 paid to the company that caused them … another COVID statistic.

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Horrific, and more errors to come out I expect

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Who awarded the contract to this newly formed company in the first place?

Concerns were raised by the press back in 2020 about the way this contract was awarded to a newly created company - there seems to have been a lot of bypassing standard checks and tender processes going on back then.

I know we were in an emergency situation but when Johnson was PM and Hancock was Health Secretary they were giving out contracts to any Tom, Dick or Harry.

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All the testing was way off. It was even worse the other way around giving false positives.

Remember when you laughed at me when I told you ?

Exactly … :+1:

Which is why no-one should believe any of the lies being peddled by the newly-invented “SuperMatt”.