Nikki Fried blames Quest test dump on ‘lack of leadership’ from Gov. office

Nikki Fried, Florida’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services, blamed the Governor for a “lack of leadership and oversight” that led to a dump of COVID-19 tests this week.

Quest Diagnostics dropped a batch of 75,000 tests on Monday, some of them dating back to April, tests reflecting infection rates at the peak of the pandemic.

A vexed Gov. Ron DeSantis released them from their obligation, saying the data was “useless and stale” and that the company had “abdicated its responsibility.”

But for Fried, the issues revealed go beyond Quest, extending to DeSantis’ management of the COVID-19 epidemic, where she contended there has been a larger abdication from DeSantis and Surgeon General Scott Rivkees.

“We have been having issues since day one on testing and testing results,” Fried said on C-Span’s Washington Journal Thursday.

“People here have been waiting for weeks in the state of Florida to get those results. It defeats the purpose of testing if somebody’s waiting weeks to get the results, and in the meantime they’re going around and talking to friends and family and visiting establishments and spreading the virus.”

“This has always been a concern,” Fried said. “That we didn’t have the amount of labs that are necessary, and obviously with Quest, there was significant backlog they dumped.”

“It’s just showing that this is something we should have been on top of at the Department of Health. This is a contract that they initiated, and because of a lack of leadership and oversight, they didn’t understand what was going on in the state.

The Commissioner has been out of the loop in terms of the Governor’s management of the virus, which has irked her.

She has gone so far as to launch a dueling public awareness campaign.

“People want to know their leaders are working together,” Fried said,  “that their leaders are putting them first.”

“That’s just not happening in this state,” Fried lamented.