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The White House on Wednesday announced a $ 1 billion investment in rapid home coronavirus tests that it said would help quadruple their availability by the end of the year.
By December, 200 million rapid tests will be available to Americans each month, and tens of millions more will hit the market in the coming weeks, said Jeffrey D. Zients, the Covid-19 coordinator of the White House, during a press conference. Zients also said the administration would double the number of sites for the federal government’s free pharmacy testing program to 20,000.
The changes reflect the administration’s growing emphasis on home testing as a tool to slow the spread of Covid-19. President Biden said in September he would use the Defense Production Act to increase production of rapid test kits and work with retailers, including Amazon and Walmart, to expand their availability. He pledged $ 2 billion to the effort, or roughly 280 million tests.
The Biden administration’s commitment “gives manufacturers confidence in demand to increase production,” Zients said. “It’s an expansion of the industrial base, so that there is more manufacturing, based on the United States’ engagement in the testing industry.”
By December, the United States will produce about half a billion tests per month, of which about half will be home units, he added.
The Biden administration’s efforts to expand access to testing received significant momentum on Monday, when the Food and Drug Administration cleared home testing from Acon Laboratories. Dr Jeffrey E. Shuren, director of the agency’s medical device center, said the move could double home testing capacity in the coming weeks.
“By the end of the year, the automaker plans to produce more than 100 million tests per month, and that number will increase to 200 million per month by February 2022,” he said. Like tests already available from Abbott, Quidel, Becton Dickinson and other manufacturers, the Acon test is designed to detect virus proteins on a nasal swab and produces results within 15 minutes.
Zients did not specify which tests the administration’s investment would buy.
When asked why the White House hadn’t decided to spend more on testing, Zients said the administration had increased access to home testing “because innovation allowed” more tests are put on the market.
Rapid tests can cost as little as $ 10, which public health experts say can still be prohibitively expensive for some people. Mr Zients said on Wednesday that the Acon test would likely cost less than $ 10. “As more and more tests are approved and manufacturing increases, prices are expected to come down,” he said.
Rapid tests are not as sensitive as PCR tests, but experts say they are still accurate at detecting the virus in a person who shows symptoms in the first week, when the viral load is likely to be highest. high.
Some pharmacies and retailers have recently struggled to keep tests in stock or have had to place limits on the number of customers who can purchase. Demand has increased with the start of the school year and the return of employees to many workplaces.
Last week Ellume, an Australian company that makes a widely available home coronavirus test, recalled nearly 200,000 test kits over concerns over a higher than expected false positive rate. The recall did not affect most of the 3.5 million test kits that Ellume shipped to the United States.
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