Report into Immensa lab Covid errors must be published- MP

The Shadow Minister for Public Health has called on the Health Security Agency to publish a report into serious errors at a Covid-19 lab.

The Immensa Health Clinic in Wolverhampton issued an estimated 43,000 false negative results to people across the south west.

Andrew Gwynne MP said the HSA had "very serious questions to answer" and people needed to know what had gone wrong.

The HSA has said a "full investigation remains ongoing".

Immensa and its parent company Dante Labs has declined a BBC request for comment.

Concerns were raised in autumn when people received positive results from their lateral flow tests, followed by negative results in subsequent PCR tests issued by the lab between 8 September and 12 October.

It led to people who had Covid-19 being incorrectly informed they were negative and did not need to isolate.

The BBC understands a preliminary report into what went wrong was completed before Christmas, but remains unpublished.

Mr Gwynne said the big question was how the errors could have been allowed to continue for several weeks without any external checks.

"You would hope that all these laboratories were routinely tested, and that due diligence was done on the results, so that people did have confidence the results were perfect and not sending people into the community and spreading the coronavirus to all and sundry.

"The suspicion in me is that there is possibly information that they don't want to be routinely in the public domain, but transparency is required here.

"We need to know what went wrong," he said.

Professor of economics at the University of Warwick, Thiemo Fetzer, said he had been unsuccessful in applying to see the data using freedom of information requests.

He said he did not understand why it was taking so long to publish answers into what went wrong.

"The data is there so one would hope there is the will to carry this out, but so far we haven't been particularly lucky in securing access to this data," he said.

In a statement, the UK Health Security Agency said: "A full investigation remains ongoing and we will provide an update in due course; we cannot comment on any information that could form part of these investigations before they are complete."

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