After blaming last week’s botched effort to distribute 500,000 tests before New Year’s Day on a local wholesaler, Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration said Tuesday that it is still engaged in talks with the company to deliver tests to the state.
Lamont’s office also sought Tuesday to clarify what it said was a case of the governor misspeaking: Neither the governor nor the state’s top health official had seen pictures of the tests readied for shipment to Connecticut. Pictures had been mentioned by both officials on consecutive days as evidence that the state had a deal in place for the tests.
Copies of a purchase order and other procurement documents provided by Lamont’s office over the weekend identify the state’s source for the doomed shipment as Jack Rubenstein CT, LLC, based in Glastonbury. The point-of-contact listed on the documents is the company’s owner, Jeffrey Barlow.
Both Barlow and a Lamont spokesman said Tuesday that discussions were ongoing between the two sides regarding future shipments of testing kits.
“I’m still working diligently on finding kits for them, so I’d rather spend my time there,” Barlow said Tuesday when asked about the company’s initial deal to provide testing kits last week.
Lamont declined to publicly identify the company during a press conference last week in which he announced that the shipment of tests failed to arrive, though he and other officials repeatedly accused the state’s supplier of misleading them to believe that the tests were being loaded on a plane bound for Connecticut.
During the Thursday press conference, Department of Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani went so far as to say the company’s misrepresentations included photographs sent to state officials, a claim that Lamont then picked up on the next day when speaking to reporters in New Britain.
“You know that we were told in no uncertain terms, even with pictures, that the tests were in the plane,” Lamont said Friday.
A spokesman for Lamont, Max Reiss, said on Tuesday that the governor had misspoken.
“What was represented was that the tests were confirmed for CT but that there were delays getting them in the shipping pipeline, like we said last week. The photo was of what CT would be receiving, what the packaging looked like of iHealth kits,” Reiss said in a text message. “There was never a photo of cases on a plane or anything like that.’
When asked last week whether he would ever work for the company again, Lamont said he did not know and that he was “focused on the issue at hand,” of finding another supply of tests. Lamont was able to later acquire a slightly smaller shipment of at-home tests from CVS Health, which were distributed Sunday.
When asked whether Lamont’s depiction of the company’s supposed deal to provide the state with 500,000 tests was accurate, Barlow said had not seen the governor’s remarks and ended the phone call.
Reiss said in a text message Tuesday that the administration is “in discussion with them and other providers to source more tests.”
Connecticut reported purchasing more than $14.9 million worth of medical supplies from the company between April and December, 2020, according to vendor data from the Office of State Comptroller. The state did not report doing any business with the company during the five previous fiscal years before the pandemic.
Barlow, a graduate of Tulane University, told the school’s alumni association last year how he had a “light-bulb moment,” to sell equipment such as masks to the state after the pandemic disrupted his existing business of importing consumer electronics from China.
“It definitely was a learning curve for me,” Barlow told the alumni group. “You have to learn quickly to listen and talk to people and try to understand both the customer side and the supplier side and learn about the different products and levels. When you’re placing orders of millions of units at a time, you want to make sure you’re getting the right product for what the customers require.”
Barlow did not say Tuesday how many tests he hoped to acquire for the state, or what happened to the original shipment expected last week. The purchase order provided by the state shows the price of the total order of tests kits — 1.5 million, with 1 million of those to be delivered in January — was $18.54 million.
House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R- North Branford, said he was told by the administration that the state was out-bid by another buyer seeking a similarly large shipment of tests.
When asked whether the state had any lingering concerns about working with Jack Rubenstein CT, LLC, Reiss declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of discussions with the company.
