White House will spend $1B for home tests

Purchase expected to quadruple U.S. total by December.

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 U.s.based Acon Laboratories.

The White House expects that 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 officer 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 hyper-transmissable 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 U.S. has lagged behind 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. Public health experts faulted the FDA for not moving faster to expedite the tests’ availability.

“These tests are cheap to make — and there’s a lot of demand for it out there,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “The reason the market hasn’t worked is because the FDA has made it very difficult for these tests to get out into the marketplace.”