When many Americans received rapid Covid-19 tests in the mail this month — sent as part of the Biden administration’s program to expand access to free testing — the package contained a bright orange box with a small label saying “Made in China.”
Those tests were manufactured by iHealth Labs, the U.S. unit of Chinese medical device company Andon Health. In January, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) awarded the company more than $1.7 billion in contracts to provide about 350 million rapid tests — a hefty chunk of the 1 billion free test kits that President Biden has pledged to distribute to American households, with the rest coming from other companies such as Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories and the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche.
Experts say that using test kits manufactured by iHealth and other overseas firms makes sense for the U.S. as the country tries to combat the infectious Omicron variant of Covid — even in the midst of a push for greater economi
Subscribe or login to read the rest.
Subscribers get full access to:
- Exclusive longform investigative journalism, Q&As, news and analysis, and data on Chinese business elites and corporations. We publish China scoops you won't find anywhere else.
- A weekly curated reading list on China from David Barboza, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Shanghai correspondent for The New York Times.
- A daily roundup of China finance, business and economics headlines.
We offer discounts for groups, institutions and students. Go to our
Subscriptions page for details.
