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Dearborn man's company makes 500K coronavirus test swabs a day, but state won't take them

Updated  April 23, 2020 11:33pm EDT
Coronavirus in Michigan
FOX 2 Detroit

DEARBORN, Mich. (FOX 2) - Could the road to Michigan's economic recovery from the coronavirus run through Dearborn?

Al Siblani's company Envisiontec believes it could. It is mass producing COVID-19 test swabs with 3-D printers.

Deaborn man’s company is 3-D printing COVID-19 test swabs but the state’s red tape is getting in way

Could the road to Michigan's economic recovery from the coronavirus run through Dearborn.

"We're running 24 hours a day, seven days a week and we're scaling up to produce a million swabs a day," Siblani said.

Widespread testing is critical in the fight to slow the spread of COVID-19 and gradually re-open the state, which has been under a stay at home order since mid-March. A shortage of testing resources including swabs, is holding it up.

Even so, Siblani says the state of Michigan has given him the cold shoulder.

"There's plenty of business but it just hurts us that we're a Michigan-based company in the backyard, but we cannot hear from the governor," he said.  

Siblani says the states of New York, Florida, California and Nevada have all reached out to him and he's shipping millions of test swabs to hospitals in metro Detroit and across the country.

Right now Envisiontec is cranking out about half million test swabs a day. Late Thursday, Siblani says he had a call with the white house. 

"I talked with the general who's in charge of logistics for the Defense Department through the white house executive taskforce," he said. "They love what we're doing and they want us to make more, so we can protect the citizens and get them tested."  

So if all this is right in our backyard, why isn't the state of Michigan taking advantage of it?

FOX 2 reached out to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services which provided a statement saying in part:

"Because 3-D printed swabs are new technology, MDHHS is undergoing due diligence to ensure every possible product meets all of the best safety and accuracy standards for the people of Michigan."

"It doesn't matter how they're made," Siblani said. "It's whether they work or not."

The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston - Harvard medical school's teaching and research affiliate -  believes it does.

It conducted a clinical trial and named Envisiontech's swabs as one of four that could be used in COVID-19 testing.

Siblani's message to the state of Michigan:

"Get to work, get them verified, and do whatever you have to do," he said. "You've had them before everybody else, be as effective as everybody else and get them approved, just like Harvard approved them, just like every other hospital in the nation is using them."