Officials at a Canadian DNA lab knew its prenatal paternity tests were misidentifying babies’ biological fathers, often ruling out the true dads — but continued to sell the tests for more than $1,000, an investigation has found.
Harvey Tenenbaum, the owner of Toronto-based Viaguard Accu-Metrics, admitted that the at-home tests it was selling for nearly a decade were “never that accurate” when speaking to an undercover CBC producer, the news station reports.
“The tests were not that accurate… And we’re leery of that test now,” the 91-year-old told the producer, who was posing as a prospective customer.
He went on to acknowledge that false results could upend families, just as it had for one man in Atlanta, Ga.
“There’s a lot involved if it gets screwed up,” Tenenbaum said.
“What if it’s the wrong guy and you’re aborting your child of, you know, a wrong person,” he posited, noting: “We can imagine everything [that] happens in life… You see them all, and worse and worse.”
In one instance, he described how the prenatal tests identified a white man as the biological father, but the child was born black.
He previously claimed the erroneous results were the result of mistakes expectant parents made when they gathered their samples and shipped them back to the lab.
“You do thousands of tests and half the errors are the collection problems,” Tenenbaum claimed.
When the CBC approached him directly, Tenenbaum also declared that the tests were “accurate” and “perfect,” and that he simply stopped selling them because the price of one of the testing substances surged, according to the outlet.
Viaguard started selling the tests in December 2010, but stopped offering them at some point between December 2020 and 2021, the CBC reports.
The tests, which sold for $800 to slightly more than $1,000, were designed to match the DNA of a fetus using a mother’s blood sample to that of the biological father.
But it seems the company relied more on guesswork than on science, according to the CBC.
One woman who worked for the lab in 2019, Sika Richot, claimed she was coached to ask women seeking the prenatal paternity test kits about the timing of their menstrual cycle and the dates they had intercourse with different men.
Staff members would then enter that information into an online ovulation calendar to narrow down the possible biological father, and Richot would enter the information into a form that went out to Tenenbaum to sign off on, she told the CBC.
“[Tenenbaum] would always make a comment like, ‘It’s definitely this one. It’s this one, it’s got to be this one,’” Richot recounted.
Dr. Mohammad Akbar, the director of research at the molecular genetics lab at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, also told the outlet that the at-home tests Viaguard was providing its customers would not actually work because it required pregnant women to only prick themselves for a blood sample — but a DNA match would require a lot of a mother’s blood.
Even those who went to a lab to get their blood drawn for the tests, though, said it wrongly identified the biological father.
By 2015, the Standards Council of Canada stripped Viaguard of its accreditation, with federal court records showing that the government agency was aware of issues with its tests.
The Standards Council received nine complaints over the course of four years, including two representing “multiple customers,” according to a 2017 report obtained by the CBC.
It said “a common theme of erroneous or inaccurate results” ran through the complaints, which focused on “paternity or familial testing.”
Still, the company continued to sell the tests, including to an unidentified woman in Georgia who determined that John Brennan was the biological father.
John Brennan, from Atlanta, bought a house and a car to prepare for a baby and after he was born, Brennan was elated.
He even got the boy’s name — Travis — tattooed on his upper arm, CBC reports.
Soon, though, his relationship with the boy’s mother started to sour, and Brennan spent about $20,000 in a custody battle with her.
The child’s mother then obtained a separate postnatal paternity test, which confirmed that another man was the actual father, and broke the news to him over text message in January 2017.
Brennan said he spiraled into a self-destructive depression in the aftermath.
“There’s not a handbook on how to handle raising a kid for eight months and then finding out that it’s not yours,” he told the CBC.
“You’re left in a mysterious, dark place mentally.”
His tattoo now reads “Travesty.”
The Post has reached out to Viaguard for comment.
