


City officials acknowledged Friday that millions of dollars worth of COVID-19 tests and hand sanitizer ordered to supply a desperate Big Apple during the height of the pandemic sat unused for months, have since expired and now will be trashed.
The tallies from the Department of Citywide Services valued the tranche of supplies at $58.8 million — and revealed that $14.1 million worth had already been tossed after expiring, while an additional $13.7 million is set to be thrown out as well.
Those losses are in addition to the nearly $225 million worth of gear — including $12 million in ventilators — that have been auctioned off for a paltry $500,000.
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“Dedicated public servants did heroic work obtaining COVID supplies during the pandemic,” DCAS spokesman Nick Benson told The Post. “Supplies were purchased to meet potential worst-case scenarios, and fortunately the city had ample supplies, helping us save lives and beat back the surge, instead of falling short.”
Benson added that the soon-to-be trashed tests and sanitizer had both reached their expiration dates and “had to be disposed.”
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The disclosure on Friday followed two separate stories published by investigative news non-profit The City, which focused on the fate of New York’s pandemic supplies as the five boroughs move back toward normal.
The sale of the ventilators is especially painful. They were highly touted by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, who ordered them built as the city struggled to overcome crippling shortages of the devices during the earliest days of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.
“This is a story about doing the impossible,” de Blasio bragged that April. “We’d never made a ventilator before — and so we made thousands. We learned it would take a year — and so we did it in a month.”
At a news conference Tuesday, current Mayor Eric Adams blamed the city having to swallow its losses on a bureaucratic requirement that surplus purchases be sold off after 90 days.
“That’s just a bad rule,” Hizzoner said. “COVID created an environment that none of us expected and so, we had to purchase far more than what we would have traditionally purchased.”
“So, somewhere in the charter rule, we need to state that under certain circumstances, we are not forced with, ‘Hey, it’s 90 days, let’s get rid of this stuff, no matter what the cost is that’s associated with it.’”