The story of UtahTech.. (via The New Yorker)
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Within Utah, however, concerns about the initiative arose almost immediately. One question was why TestUtah’s online assessment asked users whether they were allergic to hydroxychloroquine, a malaria and lupus drug that raised hopes, early on, of a possible treatment for covid-19, and whose effects, in the absence of much evidence, President Trump had praised as “like a miracle.” From the beginning, Newman had envisioned treatment as a central pillar of TestUtah’s efforts, along with assessment and testing. In an e-mail he’d sent to his peers in Utah’s tech industry, in March, which was first obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune, Newman said that he was negotiating access to twenty thousand “med packs,” which included hydroxychloroquine, through a local pharmacy chain called Meds in Motion. By the time TestUtah launched, however, medical opinion had begun to turn against hydroxychloroquine; one prominent Utah physician warned state officials in late March that making the drug available without a prescription, as they had been discussing, “could be a grave mistake medically.” On April 24th, the Tribune reported that Newman sat on the board of directors of Meds in Motion. The pharmacy chain’s owner, anticipating a run on the drug, had purchased eighteen hundred pounds of hydroxychloroquine, some of which he sold to Utah at elevated prices before the state unwound the contract. In a statement, Nomi, Newman’s startup, told me that “there was no conflict of interest.”
A more persistent concern about TestUtah was its funding. At the launch, Clint Betts, the executive director of Silicon Slopes, had promised that “no tech company is going to make any money off of this. We’re going to make sure of that.” A few hours later, on a Zoom call with the governor, the lieutenant governor, and others, Ryan Smith, whose company, Qualtrics, had designed the online assessment for TestUtah, said, “We’re happy to help. We’re doing it all for free.” Smith, who wore a crisp white hoodie and a black Silicon Slopes ball cap, acknowledged that there would always be skeptics, but said that “they should know by now, we’re all just trying to help because our families are here. There’s nothing else to read into. There’s no angle.
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