Biden’s COVID-19 Tests Plan: Too Little, Too Late |
By Doug Badger |
The Daily Signal, Jan. 25, 2020
President Joe Biden has a new plan on rapid, at-home COVID-19 testing, but as with much of his administration’s pandemic policy, the plan is convoluted, costly, and late.
Making affordable, rapid at-home tests widely available empowers people to learn their COVID-19 status. Instead of relying on mandates and compulsion, this approach equips people to make informed decisions for themselves and their families.
It’s a good idea and would have been better if launched 18 months ago, or at least a year ago, before the steepest spikes in infections. Rapid tests got tangled in the Food and Drug Administration bureaucracy during the Trump administration, and the Biden administration wove a web of czars, task forces, working groups, and advisory councils that snarled decision-making and garbled messaging.
| Despite two presidents who sang the virtues of at-home testing and congressional authorization of $53 billion for COVID-19 testing (of which $29 billion remains unspent), their subordinates never found a way to get rapid tests into the hands of consumers.
Now that the omicron variant appears to be receding, the Biden administration, at last, has a plan.
It involves more insurance mandates and the U.S. mail. What could go wrong?
…And the administration is launching these rapid-testing programs just as some are questioning their value. A preprint study found that the Quidel and BinaxNOW rapid antigen tests failed to register positive results in some people infected with the omicron variant.