How a philanthropic COVID-19 testing effort by Utah tech companies like Nomi Health and Domo became a commercial enterprise, despite questions about performance
At a White House briefing, on April 23rd, Mike Pence offered what he described as “encouraging news” about covid-19 testing. Tweets: @kimgoodwin , @newsvulcan , @statmandue , @wilbanks , @newyorker , @bobbybaird , @scottjbecker , @billylea , @newyorker , @michaelluo , and @nebraskamegan Tweets: Kim Goodwin / @kimgoodwin : How tech solutionism can seriously mess with healthcare: https://www.newyorker.com/... Chris Vanocur / @newsvulcan : I know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record but...I continue to be astonished this isn't a bigger story in Utah. How Utah's Tech Industry Tried to Disrupt Coronavirus Testing https://www.newyorker.com/... via @NewYorker Paul Ruth / @statmandue : How Utah's Tech Industry Tried to Disrupt Coronavirus Testing https://www.newyorker.com/... via @NewYorker Privatize the profit, socialize the risk. Name of the game in degenerate capitalism. John Wilbanks / @wilbanks : This story on TestUtah is infuriating. Grifters misuse “open source” to mean “anything I can buy on the internet and jam into a shitty local operation for which i overbill you.” Carpet in the lab pushed me over the limit to true rage. https://www.newyorker.com/... @newyorker : “This is a potential public health disaster,” an infections-disease doctor wrote, of TestUtah's attempt to disrupt coronavirus testing in the state. A pandemic, he said, “is not the time for amateurs to learn.” https://nyer.cm/2KpNx8t Robert P. Baird / @bobbybaird : My latest for @newyorker is an investigation about a group of Utah tech companies that decided, in mid-March, to get into the COVID-19 testing business. https://www.newyorker.com/... Scott Becker / @scottjbecker : Simple message about laboratory testing & leadership: quality and integrity matter! I appreciate disruption & innovation in a #publichealth emergency but QUALITY must remain the foundational bedrock of lab testing. A great @bobbybaird piece in @NewYorker https://www.newyorker.com/... Bill Lea / @billylea : TestUtah sounds alot like Theranos ... “the floor was gridded w/glue lines where tiles had been pulled up. “We went into a room that looked like a storage closet. They had an old rickety desk that looked like it was from the 1970s with the oKtopure sitting on top of it.” https://twitter.com/... @newyorker : Utah's governor called TestUtah “a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership.” The lieutenant governor called the program “a game changer.” Within the state, however, concerns about the initiative arose almost immediately. https://nyer.cm/95rJEuy Michael Luo / @michaelluo : Alarming investigation by @bobbybaird for @NewYorker abt a group of Utah tech companies that secured COVID-19 testing contracts in Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, and Nebraska. https://www.newyorker.com/... Senator Megan Hunt / @nebraskamegan : An excellent investigation by @bobbybaird for @NewYorker about a group of Utah tech companies that secured multimillion $$ no-bid COVID-19 testing contracts in Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, and Nebraska. I contributed to this story and I hope you read it. https://www.newyorker.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The story lands inside a long-running tension in Utah's Silicon Slopes startup culture, which earlier coverage described as a close-knit scene whose CEOs share training and ethics but struggle to diversify talent. TestUtah began as those companies' philanthropic answer to a testing shortage the federal effort had failed to fill — much as Google's spring testing site fell well short of what was promised from the White House podium (Google's COVID work) — before the governor cast it as a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership.
What changed is that the charity became a business: Nomi Health, Domo and their partners converted volunteer testing into multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts across Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, and Nebraska, even as public health experts warned of quality problems and critics flagged open-source claims, overbilling, and lab conditions. The episode extends a pattern of tech firms pressing long-held goals during the emergency (tech's pandemic lobbying push) and of startups overstating capabilities under crisis pressure, as One Concern did with disaster-response AI (exaggerated disaster-tech claims).
First-order effects
- Nomi Health and its partners now hold paid, no-bid testing contracts in four states, converting TestUtah's philanthropic apparatus into recurring commercial revenue while the same program carries unresolved safety and quality complaints from public health experts.
- State officials who endorsed TestUtah as a model partnership are directly exposed to the allegations of overbilling and poor lab conditions, since they signed off on sole-source awards without competitive vetting.
Second-order effects
- States still short on testing capacity face a template decision: replicate fast, no-bid tech partnerships or slow down for competitive procurement, with Utah now serving as both sales pitch and cautionary exhibit for vendors like Nomi Health.
- The specific accusations — misuse of open-source claims and overbilling — invite audits and legislative scrutiny that raise the diligence bar for every vendor seeking emergency public-health contracts, including competitors bidding against them.
Third-order effects
- If crisis procurement keeps favoring speed over verification, emergency conditions become an entry point for tech firms to build durable government revenue streams on thin performance records — a structural shift in how public health capacity gets built and who captures it.
- The gap between marketed capability and delivered performance echoes the One Concern pattern, pointing toward a broader accountability problem: oversight mechanisms built for traditional contractors are being asked to police software-era claims they were never designed to evaluate.
The trend: Emergency public-health contracting is becoming a commercial beachhead for tech companies, with philanthropic pilots converting into no-bid government revenue faster than oversight can verify performance.