The Federal Public Health Service and Federal Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke committed a series of major blunders relating to the supply of Covid-19 materials, at the time of the pandemic, as per the sources.
According to the information, on June 10, it was reported that in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, about 400,000 people from Belgium had received COVID-19 tests using “counterfeit” nasal swabs.
The Federal government gave out nose swabs to health care centres all over the nation, which were found to be “non-compliant.” These swabs offered no guarantees that they were sterile, which could have affected the results of the tests.
Moreover, Vandenbroucke acknowledged that the distribution of these substandard nasal swabs had indeed occurred but that “risk analyses” had been conducted after the fact.
As mentioned above, 400,000 faulty swabs were delivered as part of three separate purchases containing potentially contaminated swabs between May and September 2020.
Along with this, from the month of May onwards, 170,000 Belscan nasal swabs were purchased, but they did not contain all the necessary information on their packaging as required by European legislation.
In August, two testing laboratories received an extra 80,000 iClean nose swabs from Belgium’s strategic supply, which were later discovered to be non-compliant and counterfeit. In the same month, an additional 150,000 nasal swabs manufactured by AnyShape were found to have manufacturing flaws.
Furthermore, despite the fact that all 400,000 test swabs had flaws, the goods were not recalled and continued to be used.
The danger of using defective swabs was “considered insignificant” by the Health Ministry compared to not providing any tests due to a lack of swabs across Europe.
