White House details strategies to combat delta, omicron variants

WASHINGTON » Hours after the second confirmed infection from the new omicron variant in the United States, President Joe Biden announced an array of measures Thursday to protect Americans from the virus, including campaigns to increase vaccinations and booster shots, more stringent testing requirements for international travelers and plans to make rapid at-home coronavirus testing free for more people.

While some of the measures are new - notably a plan to launch “family mobile vaccination clinics,” where all eligible members of a family can simultaneously get shots or boosters - others build on existing tactics, such as rallying businesses to mandate vaccination-or-testing requirements for employees.

Biden’s package of coronavirus strategies comes as the nation grapples with mounting infections and deaths driven by the delta variant and braces for the emergence of the still-mysterious omicron. Scientists caution that it will take days, if not weeks, to understand if the new variant can evade current vaccines or cause more severe symptoms in infected people.

White House officials said the measures would allow schools and businesses to stay open while keeping Americans safe from a mutation-laden variant whose transmissibility and other characteristics are not yet understood. “We are pulling out all the stops to get people the maximum amount of protection as we head into winter months,” a senior administration official told reporters on a conference call Wednesday night.

Biden formally unveiled the plan at the National Institutes of Health on Thursday afternoon in a speech that sought to reassure Americans and also to rally them around a common enemy. “I hope this is a moment we can do what we haven’t been able to do enough of through this whole pandemic,” Biden said. “Get the nation to come together . . . to protect one another, to protect our economic recovery and to think of it in terms of literally a patriotic responsibility.”

Ahead of Biden’s speech, public health experts said new measures to ward off the coronavirus were overdue, lamenting the slow pace of vaccinations, the rise of misinformation that has fueled vaccine hesitancy and other factors they said have left the nation vulnerable to a potential winter surge of infections. For instance, 58 percent of Americans were considered “fully vaccinated” against the coronavirus as of Nov. 1 - a figure that climbed to only 59.4 percent as of Dec. 1, according to The Washington Post’s vaccination tracker.

“We’re going the wrong way” on vaccination status, said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. He said the nation should aim to inoculate at least 80 percent of its population to ensure sufficient protection against another spike in cases. But “we’re at 59 [percent] and fading,” Topol said.

Topol and others also lamented that the nation’s testing capability remains insufficient, with many Americans unable to obtain rapid tests that they should be using before going to work or family gatherings, especially amid regional outbreaks.

“So much of the next phase of covid depends on easy, rapid access to testing,” for access to antiviral treatments or complying with employer mandates, said Nirav D. Shah, president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Many of Biden’s measures center on encouraging more Americans to get vaccines or booster shots, which the administration has stressed provide the best protection against all known coronavirus variants. The federal health department will launch new ads and events, focused on seniors, to encourage all adult Americans to get booster shots as soon as they are eligible. The government also will partner with AARP, the advocacy group for older Americans, to convene booster-focused town halls, offer rides to vaccination sites and pursue other strategies to boost uptake.

Meanwhile, the federal health department will send a notice to the approximately 63 million people covered by the Medicare program, offering instructions and encouragement on how to get boosters.

Medicaid, the safety net health insurance program, also will reimburse participating health-care providers for “COVID-19 counseling visits,” where health workers answer families’ questions about vaccines and stress the importance of getting children immunized.

Another major plank of Biden’s plan is enabling Americans covered by private health insurance to be reimbursed for purchasing rapid, at-home coronavirus test kits.