Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit against the Center for COVID Control, claiming the company provided false, invalid and delayed COVID-19 tests to thousands of residents.
The Illinois-based company operated 300 testing sites nationwide, including 13 in Washington.
“Center for COVID Control contributed to the spread of COVID-19 when it provided false negative results,” Ferguson said in a Monday press release. “These sham testing centers threatened the health and safety of our communities. They must be held accountable.”
Ferguson added that in some cases, the company did not provide any results.
The lawsuit, filed in King County Superior Court, asserts that the Center for COVID Control violated the state’s Consumer Protection Act when it failed to deliver “prompt, valid and accurate results,” and by making promises that it could deliver results within 48 hours.
Ferguson said he plans to file a preliminary injunction to stop the company from operating and will seek the soonest hearing date possible.
The attorney general’s investigation found that testing samples were stored in garbage bags for more than a week, rather than being properly refrigerated, and samples were back dated so they could still be tested.
The company’s 13 sites in Washington included Lakewood, Tacoma, University Place, Seattle, Bellevue, Auburn, Lynwood, Port Orchard and Yakima. It also did not have a valid business license to operate in any of those municipalities except Yakima.
The Center for COVID Control announced Jan. 13 it was temporarily pausing operations in Washington after the city of Lakewood issued a stop work order for operating without a business license.
“When a business is collecting personal information from thousands of customers and performing sensitive medical testing, yet fail to produce a $73 business license, that is cause for concern,” Jim Kopriva, the city’s communications manager, said in a press release at the time.
The company promised results within 15 minutes for a rapid antigen test and within 48 hours for the more accurate PCR test.
Former employees told investigators the company was receiving up to 10,000 tests per day nationwide and data entry staff could not keep up, the Washington AG’s office reported.
Ferguson said the company has billed the federal government $124 million for performing tests on uninsured patients and instructed employees to mark patients as uninsured even if they had insurance. They eventually changed their data entry form and auto-filled “uninsured” as the default for all patients.
The lawsuit seeks civil penalties of $12,500 for each infraction of the Consumer Protection Act and for the company to relinquish all profits, as well as pay attorney and court fees.
