A look at how a single family feud threatened America’s entire COVID-19 testing enterprise.
Olivia Carville (@livcarville) a member of the NYFWA’s board of governors and a Bloomberg reporter, discusses how she went about researching, reporting and writing her recent Bloomberg Businessweek cover story: “America’s Covid Swab Supply Depends on Two Cousins Who Hate Each Other” with Peter Coy (@petercoy), a member of the NYFWA’s board of governors and the economics editor of Bloomberg Businessweek.
Carville’s story details the government’s efforts to source the swabs needed for COVID-19 testing and why only two companies in the world, only one of which is in the U.S., could provide them. Puritan Medical Products swabs became a crucial part of testing for the coronavirus almost overnight last March, but the two cousins who own the company hated one another so much they refused to speak and were embroiled in a legal battle to dissolve their business in the weeks before the virus hit. This story chronicles how a small Maine company became an unlikely hero in the pandemic and why a $250 million infusion from the U.S. government wasn’t enough to quell this epic family feud.
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