On Jul. 15, 2020, BD (Becton, Dickinson) announced a commitment from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to purchase BD diagnostic solutions in expanding access to rapid point-of-care testing for COVID-19 through a broad, decentralized network of testing instrumentation.

HHS has committed to purchase 2,000 BD Veritor™ Plus Systems and 750,000 SARS-CoV-2 antigen test kits for use on the system. Distribution is set to begin next week.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted BD an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for its BD Veritor™ Plus System for Rapid Detection of SARS-CoV-2 earlier this month. The test leverages BD Veritor™ Plus Analyzers, portable instruments that are slightly larger than a cell phone, which are already in use in more than 25,000 hospitals, clinician offices, urgent care centers and retail pharmacies in all 50 U.S. states. Its one-button functionality, workflow flexibility, and ease-of-use make it an ideal solution for settings without laboratory personnel. It offers customers real-time reporting capabilities through the BD Synapsys™ informatics solution, providing them with the ability to easily report data for disease monitoring and surveillance purposes.

BD began shipping limited quantities of its BD Veritor™ Plus SARS-CoV-2 antigen test kits to distributors last week as it ramps up production capacity. BD is leveraging its global manufacturing network and scale and expects to increase capacity to be able to produce 2 million tests per week by the end of September. The company expects to produce up to 10 million tests from July through September.

In addition to a SARS-CoV-2 antigen assay for the BD Veritor™ Plus System, BD and a network of partners offer a portfolio of COVID-19 testing solutions including highly sensitive molecular diagnostic tests on the BD MAX™ System.