Coronavirus: Private clinic defends charging £375 for test
Firm says service includes ‘clinical support’ as well as kit available online for £120
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Your support makes all the difference.A private health clinic that sold coronavirus home-testing kits online has defended its decision to charge three times the normal price.
The firm, which calls itself the Private Harley Street Clinic despite being registered to a virtual office in central London, claimed to have taken thousands of orders worth a total of more than £2m by offering the service for £375.
The kits themselves are supplied by another company, Randox Health, which sells them online for just £120.
Following reports that the clinic may have profited by as much as £1.7m, the clinic insisted that its £375 service was “not just a test” and included a telephone consultation with its director, Dr Mark Ali, if the test came back positive for Covid-19.
“We offer a clinical service which includes all the logistics and clinical support throughout the process and beyond for coronavirus testing,” the firm said.
“The test is a panel test which will differentiate between the lethal Covid-19 virus and 9 other non lethal viruses with the same symptoms.”
The clinic is now offering refunds to any customers who have not yet received their testing kits, after the suppliers ran out of stock and stopped taking new orders until 30 March.
“These supply delays have already caused significant anxiety for our clients,” the clinic said. “As a consequence, the only course of action we can take is to refund everyone whose kits have not yet been dispatched.”
The clinic was accused of “profiteering behaviour” by shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth, who called on the government to “stamp out this exploitative behaviour”.
But Dr Ali rejected the criticism, telling The New York Times that his clinic ”met a national need when the government was doing very little”. He had previously claimed to have sold more than 6,600 tests in a week.
Public Health England currently advise against using home testing kits. “There is little information on the accuracy of the tests, or on how a patient’s antibody response develops or changes during Covid-19 infection,” it said last week.
“It is not known whether either a positive or negative result is reliable, and currently there is no published evidence about the suitability of these tests for diagnosing Covid-19 infection in a community setting.”
Demand for private testing increased after the NHS restricted its use for at-risk groups. Boris Johnson said last week that testing would increase to 25,000 a day but it is still running at around 5,000 a day.
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