By Mike Tony, Charleston Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — COVID-19 has been lucrative for vendors testing for the deadly virus.
The state Department of Health and Human Resources paid more than $100 million in taxpayer money to vendors for COVID testing in open-end contracts, according to a Gazette-Mail review of thousands of pages of contracts and corresponding invoices the agency received throughout the pandemic. More than a third of that money went to an out-of-state vendor.
West Virginia was among 14 states with a “high” average charge of more than $144.56 for diagnostic tests, according to a 2020 Johns Hopkins study covering the first four months of the pandemic.
There has been “a lot of price gouging going on” across the country, said Jeremy Sanford, a University of California Santa Cruz biology professor who helped create a COVID testing company in California that no longer is in business…
