Biden's latest big COVID mistake

Joe Biden had the opportunity to stockpile hundreds of thousands of COVID tests. Unfortunately, Mr. Biden dithered and lost that opportunity.

According to Vanity Fair's reporting, "With omicron cases spreading like wildfire, the White House is finally taking steps to make free antigen tests available to all. But this fall, Vanity Fair has learned, it dismissed a bold plan to ramp up rapid testing ahead of the holidays."

It continues:

The plan, in effect, was a blueprint for how to avoid what is happening at this very moment—endless lines of desperate Americans clamoring for tests in order to safeguard holiday gatherings, just as COVID-19 is exploding again. Yesterday, President Biden told David Muir of ABC News, "I wish I had thought about ordering" 500 million at-home tests "two months ago." But the proposal shared at the meeting in October, disclosed here for the first time, included a “Bold Plan for Impact” and a provision for "Every American Household to Receive Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays/New Year."

Three days after the meeting, on October 25, the COVID-19 testing experts—who hailed from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, the COVID Collaborative, and several other organizations—received a back channel communication from a White House official. Their big, bold idea for free home tests for all Americans to avoid a holiday surge, they were told, was dead. That day, the administration instead announced an initiative to move rapid home tests more swiftly through the FDA’s regulatory approval process.

The article reports that "We did not have capacity to manufacture over-the-counter tests at that scale." The problem is, according to CNN's Jeff Zeleny's tweet, that capacity still doesn't exist:
This is when a public-private partnership is most beneficial. Had the administration cut through the red tape and gotten more tests approved, they could've ordered tests to be purchased immediately. That, in turn, would've given the company or companies the capital they needed to ramp up manufacturing capacity. Had that happened in October, we'd be closer to meeting our needs by now.

On December 2, with omicron threatening an imminent wave of new infections, Biden announced a smattering of smaller-scale plans that included requiring insurance companies to reimburse privately insured patients who buy at-home rapid tests, which sell for as much as $35 for a box of two tests—if you can find them amid widespread shortages. Four days after that, White House press secretary Jen Psaki seemed to deride the very idea of free nationwide home tests. "Should we just send one to every American?" she mused sarcastically from the briefing room podium. "Then what happens if you—if every American has one test? How much does that cost, and then what happens after that?"
When the China virus first hit, California and New York were very short on ventilators. Rather than timidly doing little things, President Trump tasked Peter Navarro with increasing ventilator production. From the day he got the assignment to the day that they got a facility to manufacture ventilators to putting together a management team to hiring and training workers to the time the first ventilator rolled off the assembly line took 17 days. This is documented in Dr. Navarro's book, aptly titled In Trump Time.

The difference in getting COVID-19 things done for the American people between the Trump administration and the Biden administration isn't just noticeable. It's historic. Joe Biden hasn't cut through red tape. Donald Trump did. Joe Biden hasn't pushed the FDA to authorize treatments that've been submitted. Trump pushed the FDA to get 3 vaccines approved.

When using verifiable numbers of production and turnaround, the disparity between administrations isn't close. The Biden administration moves like a tortoise. The Trump administration moved like lives depended on it, which it did.

GRADES:

  • Biden administration: F-
  • Trump administration: B+

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