CIC Health, a spinoff that arose from CIC during the pandemic to manage testing and vaccinations, is shutting down its Covid-19 operations.
But that might not be the end of the line for the organization, CEO Rachel Wilson told BostInno.
Wilson said it’s “a little too soon to say” what a future for CIC Health might look like beyond its pandemic response. The chief executive said she is still working at CIC Health alongside a “handful” of employees wrapping up their Covid-19 services.
“I do see other great health challenges,” Wilson said. “I remain committed to addressing human health and we, Tim (Rowe), myself, others, really are thinking hard about this.”
CIC is a Cambridge-based owner of lab and office space aimed at startup companies. The organization’s public health work initially began as an effort to keep its own clients healthy by working with the Broad Institute to provide testing for innovators working in CIC’s offices and labs.
Then CIC co-founder Tim Rowe teamed up with public-health experts such as Dr. Atul Gawande to spin out a new business called CIC Health in June 2020. CIC Health took that work to a broader audience, using public-private partnerships to make testing and vaccines more accessible.
Several years later, Wilson said, the world is now in a different place. Testing and vaccines are more widely available, and the healthcare system has more capacity than during the pandemic’s height, she said.
“In May the federal public health emergency ended and we have so many more tools and resources available to us today than we did then,” Wilson said.
The chief executive said that the end of the public health emergency meant that CIC Health’s “core pandemic response operations, what we were built to do, was naturally coming to an end.”
In a January interview with BostInno, Wilson spoke about the potential for CIC Health beyond the pandemic, including opportunities for mobilizing and training people to help support responses in areas like disease outbreaks or natural disasters.
Wilson said at the time she was also thinking about how CIC Health could take its experience to help public health departments and healthcare organizations make preventative services more widely adopted.
The Broad Institute, a CIC Health testing partner, stopped its Covid-19 diagnostic testing program on June 30. Wilson said CIC Health’s site at the Bolling Municipal Building in Roxbury was taken over by the Boston Public Health Commission in mid-May. The organization’s clinics in Boston Public Schools also ended in recent months.
CIC Health’s website now features a retrospective on its work during the pandemic. The organization said it facilitated 6.5 million tests across 18 states, distributed 13.5 million at-home tests to schools and community sites and administered 1.2 million vaccines in Massachusetts. At one point, CIC Health launched and ran the state’s first large-scale vaccination site at Gillette Stadium.
Wilson said CIC Health was paid through contracts with municipal and state governments, as well as private entities. CIC Health would often work with state governments that had received federal funding to support pandemic response.
CIC Health also posted a thank you letter, first shared by Cambridge Day, recapping its work during the pandemic and thanking its partners.
The letter reads, in part, that as its “operations conclude, CIC Health wishes to express its gratitude to every team member, every partner, every client, and every person who stood alongside us — sacrificing days, nights, and weekends away from loved ones to bravely and resiliently mitigate the impacts of a devastating global pandemic.”
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