Remember how BARDA abruptly canceled their grant p

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New questions have emerged on how the Trump administration — through BARDA — has selected where to send their Covid-19 funding, as an investigation by the Associated Press revealed a company in line for as much as $65 million in taxpayer dollars doesn’t even have physical facilities.

The latest controversy surrounds Plasma Technologies, which puts a special spin on convalescent plasma therapy by promising to get more material out of each sample.

Instead of operating a manufacturing site as government documents suggested, the company was shown to exist within the condo of its majority owner, Eugene Zurlo, in Charleston, NC, AP reported.

Zurlo’s initial proposal from May, seeking $51.6 million to build a plasma fractionation facility in North Carolina, failed to gain much traction within the HHS or the Department of Defense. Despite enthusiastic pitches by Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator and part-owner of Plasma Technologies, agency scientists saw the project as “another mouth to feed” that would stretch blood donation centers. Besides, it was a longer-term effort than the vaccines and treatments they were also funding.
Rick Bright

“They were not excited,” recalled Rick Bright, the ousted BARDA chief who’s been sharply critical of his former boss, assistant HHS Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec. “They did not jump all over this and say, ‘We’ve got to get this going right away.’”

But Plasma Technologies somehow won over Steven Morani, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Materiel Readiness, AP reported. According to Santorum, he was “drawn to the idea of a US-owned and operation fractionation facility.”

The company ended up receiving $750,000 to prove its concept, with $65 million apparently on the table to build a commercial facility. — Amber Tong

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