The tortuous saga of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s much-hyped purchase of 500,000 coronavirus tests from South Korea this past spring is an object lesson in the pitfalls that await a chief executive who assumes the powers of a procurement czar — and then blows smoke when things go wrong.
Hogan’s overall handling of the pandemic has been proactive and responsible; he deserves high marks. When he stumbled — and stumble he did, albeit with excellent motives, in an emergency order of $9.5 million of tests that turned out to be unusable — the smart move would have been to acknowledge the error, describe the fix and move on. Instead of transparency, however, Hogan dissembled, backed by a Greek chorus of question-dodging, hairsplitting, fast-talking officials in his administration.
That made a misstep into a mockery.
The misstep itself was hardly the stuff of front-page scandal. Confronted by a lethal disease about which little was known, Hogan, assisted by his Korean American wife, Yumi, turned to South Korea, which had quickly established a robust testing regime in the spring. Under his guidance, the state ordered a half-million kits known as LabGun tests from a South Korean firm, LabGenomics.
That seemed reasonable as Maryland, like other states, scrambled to respond to President Donald Trump’s absence of leadership; and he was content to leave it to governors. That was particularly evident in ramping up a testing system, without which, experts warned, the country would be flying blind into a storm of disease and death.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Unfortunately, the LabGun tests, which arrived in April amid much media fanfare, were firing blanks. As delivered, the kits didn’t align with what the Food and Drug Administration had authorized, and in the lab, they were slow and unwieldy to process. Not exactly the “exponential, game-changing” lifesavers that Hogan touted in his memoir, “Still Standing: Surviving Cancer, Riots, a Global Pandemic, and the Toxic Politics that Divide America,” published in July. Nor did they work “great,” as he told MSNBC even after The Washington Post’s Steve Thompson revealed the LabGun problems last month.
Without a word to state lawmakers, who smelled a rat when testing continued to stall in May, the original tests were returned to the manufacturer. A month after the first batch was delivered, replacements arrived at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, where the chief executive, a Hogan appointee, ordered not a word be breathed to the media, or anyone else. The cost of the replacement shipment: $2.5 million.
It wasn’t a crime, but it was a cover-up. In addition to the omerta-embracing airport chief, top state health officials stonewalled state lawmakers who asked what became of the initial tests; Hogan’s spokesman sidestepped questions from The Post; and the state’s general services chief, whose name appeared on the replacement test invoice, kept mum.
Hogan set the tone. To this day, he has not acknowledged the initial snafu, insisting that the replacement tests — which have mostly been used, though they’ve yielded too many false positives — are the “backbone of our testing strategy.”
In fact, the measure of real backbone is transparency and straight talk. That has been lacking.