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The
money will allow the company over three years to build a new
facility to produce nitrocellulose membranes, the paper that
displays test results, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. That, in turn,
will allow for 85 million more tests to be produced per month,
the official said.
It was not immediately clear when the facility would ramp up to
full production.
"It's probably the most constrained piece of technology in
expanding capacity, in making more of these over-the-counter or
point-of-care tests," the official said. "This amount they're
going to produce is roughly equivalent to another billion
over-the-counter tests being able to be made," he added.
Millipore Sigma is a supplier to major U.S. COVID-19 antigen
test manufacturers, he said, without providing further details.
The contract, which will be announced by the Department of
Defense for the Department of Health and Human Services, is part
of a bid by the Biden administration to ramp up production of
scarce rapid COVID-19 tests, which has taken on more urgency as
nations grapple with the highly infectious Omicron variant of
the coronavirus.
The average number of daily COVID-19 cases in the United States
has hit a record high of 258,312 over the past seven days,
according to a Reuters tally.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden announced a plan to
distribute 500 million at-home coronavirus test kits to help
address the crisis, building on prior pledges to invest $3
billion in test kits.
But U.S. testing is behind the curve because of a lack of
skilled workers, a shortage of at-home tests and
under-investment in recent months, and health experts in the
U.S. said Biden's latest plan was "too little, too late."
The government is invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) to
award the contract and has many more similar contracts in the
works, the official said.
The Biden administration has used the DPA - a 1950s Korean
war-era law which gives federal agencies the power to prioritize
procurement orders related to national defense - to speed
production of swabs and pipettes for COVID-19 test production
previously.
(Reporting by Alexandra Alper; Additional Reporting by Carl
O'Donnell; Editing by Chris Reese)
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