Rappler
DOH: Faulty coronavirus test kits ‘from private foundation,’ not China
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III assured the Chinese Embassy in Manila that the COVID-19 testing kits donated by the Chinese government are functional and meet the required standards.
This assurance came after DOH Undersecretary Mario Rosario Vergeire stated that some Chinese-made test kits yielded only 40 percent accuracy.
The Chinese Embassy clarified that the test kits Vergeire referred to were not part of the official donations from the Chinese government.
The DOH apologized for any confusion caused by previous statements and clarified that the kits Vergeire mentioned were from a private foundation, not the Chinese government.
Secretary Duque stated that the test kits from BGI and Sansure Biotechnology are comparable to those donated by the World Health Organization (WHO) and approved by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM).
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The Department of Health (DOH) clarified that initial batches of donated coronavirus testing kits from China, specifically 2,000 BGI RT-PCR kits and 100,000 Sansure RT-PCR kits, have been assessed by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) and found to be at par with World Health Organization (WHO) standards.
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The Department of Health (DOH) has received a donation of 100,000 test kits for COVID-19 from the Chinese government.
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The Philippine government will refuse the importation and donation of COVID-19 test kits that lack approval from the Department of Health (DOH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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Singapore is donating 3,000 COVID-19 test kits and one PCR machine to the Philippines.
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The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has allotted P53.2 million for the local development of COVID-19 test kits by the University of the Philippines-National Institute of Health (UP-NIH).
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