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WASHINGTON – The Biden administration said on Wednesday it would spend $ 1 billion on coronavirus diagnostic tests that can be administered at home and return the results within 15 minutes.
The purchase would quadruple the domestic supply of such tests by December, White House pandemic response team coordinator Jeff Zients said during a Wednesday afternoon press briefing on the coronavirus. , so that 200 million rapid tests will be available per month by then.
Zients said the federal government will distribute the rapid tests it purchases to community health centers, pantries and other institutions.
The United States was slow to adopt rapid tests, unlike countries like Germany, where rapid tests were readily available, inexpensive, and widely used. Such tests can be administered at home or in institutions such as schools or concert halls, providing a fast and accurate way to detect infections. But unless rapid tests are easily accessible for individuals and institutions, they are unlikely to do much good.
“If we’re smart,” George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok told The New York Times earlier this week, “we’ll replace masks with tests in schools, workplaces and Thanksgiving celebrations. . “
The rollout of rapid coronavirus tests has been hampered by delays in regulatory approval and, more recently, a pace of manufacturing that has been slow to meet growing demand, resulting in high prices and a lack of availablity.
Zients described Wednesday’s announcement as a good start to the effort. “As more and more tests are approved and manufacturing increases, prices are expected to come down,” he said. Rarity should also no longer be an issue if manufacturers respond as the Biden administration hopes.
The news comes just weeks after the administration announced the purchase of $ 2 billion of 280 million rapid tests. Wednesday’s additional purchase reflects recognition that even if the recent wave fueled by the highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus subsides, the onset of cold weather could lead to further spikes in infection across the country.
“We recognize there is a need,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a separate briefing later Wednesday. “We recognized that more had to be done.
Some have wondered why it took the Biden administration so long to make rapid testing a priority, given that the Food and Drug Administration first granted approval to a rapid test manufacturer in October 2020. Further approvals arrived in the following months, but in the spring. By 2021, the pandemic appeared to be on the wane, and pharmaceutical companies saw little reason to invest in diagnostic equipment.
Throughout the summer, Abbott Laboratories destroyed millions of rapid tests that they said would never be used. The Delta variant made that calculation incorrect, while the need to keep schools and businesses open only added to the urgency.
“The WH’s efforts are a good step in the right direction,” said Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina, who emerged at the start of the pandemic as one of the nation’s most vocal advocates for rapid testing, on Twitter. “But we will need more testing,” he added.
Last year, Mina and other researchers concluded in a computer analysis that a nationwide rapid testing program could stop the spread of the coronavirus.
“We have to see these tests as the essential public health tool that they are,” Mina said Wednesday. He estimated that 20 million rapid tests would need to be administered for this impact to become evident. Even with the new investment in rapid testing, the Biden administration will be well below that figure.
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