Washington:
When the Trump administration gave a well-connected Republican donor seed money to test a possible COVID-19-fighting blood plasma technology, it noted the company’s “manufacturing facilities” in Charleston, South Carolina. Plasma Technologies LLC is indeed based in the stately waterfront city. But there are no manufacturing facilities. Instead, the company exists within the luxury condo of its majority owner, Eugene Zurlo.
Zurlo’s company may be in line for as much as $65 million in taxpayer dollars; enough to start building an actual production plant, according to internal government records and other documents obtained by The Associated Press. The story of how a tiny business that exists only on paper has managed to snare attention from the highest reaches of the U.S. military and government is emblematic of the Trump administration’s frenetic response to the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s also another in a series of contracts awarded to people with close political ties to key officials despite concerns voiced by government scientists. Among the others: an ill-conceived $21 million study of Pepcid as a COVID therapy and more than a half billion dollars to ApiJect Systems America, a startup with an unapproved medicine injection technology and no factory to manufacture the devices. In addition, a government whistleblower claimed that a $1.6 billion vaccine contract to Novavax Inc. was made over objections of scientific staff.
At the center of these deals is Dr. Robert Kadlec, a senior Trump appointee at the Department of the Health and Human Services who backed the Pepcid, Novavax and ApiJect projects. Records obtained by the AP also describe Kadlec as a key supporter of Zurlo’s company. In one government email obtained by the AP, an official said Kadlec, whose job as assistant secretary for preparedness and response is to help guide the nation through public health emergencies, was “all in” on Plasma Technologies.
This was the case despite misgivings from the scientists he oversees. One of them said the company would be just another “mouth to feed” that would distract from other important work on the pandemic. An HHS spokesperson said Kadlec “does not have a role in technical review of proposals nor in negotiating contracts.” Kadlec has come under pressure from the White House to act with more urgency and not be bound by lower-level officials whom Trump has castigated as the “deep state” and accused of politically motivated delays in fielding COVID-19 vaccines and remedies. This pressure has led to investments in numerous untested companies. The AP reached out to more than a dozen blood plasma industry leaders and medical experts. Few had heard of Zurlo’s company or its technology, and would not comment.
Zurlo, the company’s founder and a former pharmaceutical industry executive, told the AP in an email that the renewed interest in his company is being driven by COVID and other diseases. “It is increasingly clear that the collection of adequate supplies of plasma is not possible; the answer being the adoption of new process technology that fully utilizes the scarce plasma currently available,” he said.
But whether Zurlo’s technology, which claims to increase the amount of disease-fighting plasma harvested from human blood, will be an improvement over other methods is still anyone’s guess..
