U.S. TO SPEND $1B TO BUY RAPID, AT-HOME COVID TESTS
Purchase aims to boost production, address shortages
The White House announced Wednesday that it will buy $1 billion worth of rapid, at-home coronavirus tests to address ongoing shortages, a plan hailed by public health experts who called the move long overdue.
The actions will quadruple the number of tests available to Americans by December, according to Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. The news follows Monday’s decision by the Food and Drug Administration to allow the sale of an antigen test from San Diego-based Acon Laboratories.
The White House expects that decision and the purchase of the additional tests will increase the number of at-home tests to 200 million per month by December.
“This is a big deal” said Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, who said the spotty availability of rapid tests had hampered efforts to track and combat the surge of coronavirus cases driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant. “The White House is beginning to take testing as seriously as they’ve taken vaccinations.”
The administration is also aiming to increase free testing by doubling President Joe Biden’s earlier commitment to expand the number of pharmacies in the federal government’s free testing program to 20,000, Zients said at a news briefing Wednesday. Biden last month announced a coronavirus response plan that envisioned a significant expansion of testing capacity.
The United States has lagged several European and Asian countries in testing for much of the pandemic, with many Americans reporting in recent months that they have struggled to get testing appointments or to be able to purchase at-home tests. While the FDA has authorized several at-home tests, public health experts criticized the agency for not moving faster to greenlight more of them to expedite the tests’ availability.
Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said the main difference between the U.S. and countries with cheaper, more available tests is that those governments heavily invested in the tests. Having large purchasing agreements, including the one announced Wednesday by the White House, drives production up and prices down, and other countries were doing that earlier.
By the end of the year, Zients said, the U.S. should have about half a billion tests available per month between at-home tests and PCR tests that people can take at a local pharmacy, clinic or doctors office.