Reader submitted. Original article by Robby Soave for Reason Magazine, published with approval.
President Joe Biden urged Americans not to panic about the omicron COVID-19 variant during a speech on Tuesday, stressing that he had a plan to deal with the latest pandemic wave: mass testing. The federal government will purchase half a billion COVID-19 tests and distribute them throughout the country for free.
According to The Washington Post:
“This is not March of 2020,” Biden said, referring to the early, pre-vaccine days of the pandemic as he spoke from the White House State Dining Room. “Two hundred million people are fully vaccinated. We’re prepared. We know more.”
The president still issued a grave warning to unvaccinated Americans who he said have a “patriotic duty” to get vaccinated, but he spent much of his speech reassuring Americans the country has the tools to avoid the extreme measures that typified the early months of the pandemic response.
To that end, Biden detailed new plans to expand coronavirus testing sites across the country, distribute a half-billion free at-home tests and deploy more federal health resources to aid strained hospitals as the omicron variant drives a fresh wave of infections.
There’s just one problem with this plan: The tests won’t arrive until January, by which point the omicron variant will have already ravaged the country, notes Reason‘s Ronald Bailey.
The White House could have gotten to work on this plan a little earlier—as recently as two weeks ago, press secretary Jen Psaki mocked the idea of having the government send free tests to all Americans. In many other countries, it’s much easier to procure inexpensive COVID-19 tests, largely because those countries’ regulatory apparatuses are not so slow-moving and bureaucratic.
Indeed, the real problem isn’t that the White House has been too slow to mail tests to every American. The real problem is that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have stymied efforts to approve various cheap, rapid test options—a costly mistake that has led to thousands of preventable deaths.
A new report by ProPublica details federal regulators’ infuriating series of screw-ups. For instance, Irene Bosch, an MIT scientist, developed a reliable 15-minute test at the start of the pandemic that only cost $10—and would have cost even less if purchased in bulk. But the FDA refused to approve the test because it wasn’t as accurate as the harder-to-come-by PCR tests.
Bosch’s test didn’t need to be the most accurate test: It just needed to be cheap and easy to mass produce. After all, people who tested positive could always get a PCR for additional verification. What’s more, Bosch’s test measured infectiousness itself:
David Paltiel, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, said a significant part of the problem is that the FDA created a detailed roadmap for tests that give patients a close-to-definitive answer on whether they have COVID-19, but never created a separate framework for rapid tests that serve a different purpose: helping people get frequent, fast evidence of whether they may be contagious.
“The former are tests of infection; the latter are tests of infectiousness,” Paltiel said. “They both share the same regulatory pathway — a pathway that was designed with diagnostic testing in mind and is littered with requirements that make no sense for the purpose they serve.”
He added, “It’s an outrage that rapid tests aren’t dirt cheap and plentiful on grocery store shelves.”
Meanwhile, the CDC thought it could invent its own, superior test—but government scientists screwed up the process, putting the country weeks behind the curve. Testing could have been an important tool for slowing the spread of COVID-19, but the federal government literally decreed that it was illegal to flood the market with tests unless they cleared an improbably, unnecessarily high regulatory burden. From ProPublica:
As ProPublica recently detailed, many companies with at-home tests have been stymied by an FDA review process that has flummoxed experts and even caused one agency reviewer to quit in frustration.
While E25Bio’s test didn’t catch quite as many cases as those now on the market, it could have been used to catch superspreaders, with warnings that a negative result wouldn’t rule out infection. Experts told us that the test could have been a vital public health tool had it been produced in the millions in 2020 just as COVID-19 was racing across the country undetected.
“Since we didn’t have other options, it would have been a very good test,” said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist who followed E25Bio’s early progress. “If we were going to war, and somebody was invading us, and we had a bunch of revolver pistols, and we didn’t yet have the shipment of machine guns, hell yeah, you’re going to pick up the revolver pistol. You do what you can when you need to in an emergency.”
The government picked up the revolver and promptly shot itself in the foot.
Reuters
“Biden Omicron measures too little, too late for fast-moving virus -experts”
By Alexandra Alper
December 23, 2021
WASHINGTON, Dec 23 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s steps to backstop hospitals and distribute coronavirus test kits, however welcome, are too little too late to stem a surge of Omicron-related coronavirus cases over Christmas and New Year’s, health experts said.
A day after Biden outlined plans to distribute 500 million at-home coronavirus test kits, Anne Rimoin, a UCLA professor of epidemiology, praised his focus on testing, a “critical tool” that the United States was “woefully” behind on.
“Unfortunately, it’s late in coming and will be a small drop in the bucket compared to the tsunami of cases on the horizon.”
The tests promised by the White House starting in January equate to just one or two per U.S. resident.
end quotes
Yes, people, that statement stopped me dead, too – first of all, how many COVID test kits does one person actually need?
And secondly, Koe Biden has ordered 500 million to serve a population of 333 million give or take, so how that math is done eludes me, since it seems Joe is going to have millions left over after everybody has gotten, so it will be like cell phones, with the whole family sitting there together, each in his or her separate corner, all engrossed in the results of their latest COVID test off their own very personal COVID test kit, and God help any family member who comes up with a positive reading, which will have the rest of the family with negatives turning on them as a threat, which takes us back to that story and COVID paranoia being instilled in the American people to make them servile and cringing:
Households need far more to make daily decisions about exposure, Rimoin said.
“We need those tests now,” she said.
end quotes
How many more than one apiece, even for the newborn babies, do these families need to make their daily decisions about COVID?
Fifteen or sixteen per person because they are so unreliable?
Getting back to that story from “The Life of Joe,” we have:
U.S. testing is behind the curve because of a lack of skilled workers, a shortage of at-home tests and under-investment in recent months, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials, health providers and testmakers.
Biden, a Democrat who took office in January, campaigned on a promise to take control of the pandemic, which his predecessor, Republican President Donald Trump, played down as hundreds of thousands died.
Biden’s latest measures, including new pop-up vaccination clinics run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and federal testing sites in the hot spot of New York City and elsewhere, were welcomed by health experts and local politicians.
end quotes
And I have to wonder how many people, ignorant and scared to death, are going into those Biden-esque “no questions asked, no proof needed” pop-up vaccination clinics on a daily basis to get another booster, just in case, because the previous booster they got was more than 24 hours old, and hey, with all the fear-mongering from Fauci and Biden going on, why take a chance.
Better to get a daily booster shot than it is to die a horrible death from COVID.
Getting back to the story:
Biden said some 1,000 military doctors, nurses and medics had been deployed to support hospitals.
He stressed the unvaccinated carried the bulk of the burden of health risks.
end quotes
To which, when I hear Joe saying that on the radio news, the middle finger goes straight up, followed by a string of expletives as to what Joe Biden can do to himself, and I am so sick of hearing that horsecrap from Joe when it is a pandemic of the vaccinated like Lizzie Warren and Antonio Delgado.
Getting back to the story:
Asked about the tests shortage in an interview broadcast on ABC late on Wednesday, the president said, “No, nothing’s been good enough,” adding, “I wish I had thought about ordering” 500 million at-home tests “two months ago.”
Nevertheless, White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the administration’s track record on testing this week, noting that it had quadrupled the size of its testing program in the last four months.
She added that Biden’s use of the Defense Production Act and $3 billion in prior investments in at-home test kits helped ramp up production capacity to where it could even handle a 500 million kit order.
State and local leaders in New York, where Omicron is surging, said they supported Biden’s approach.
But other academics criticized Biden for reassuring Americans that schools and businesses could remain open and that the vaccinated could safely gather without emphasizing the risks they face if they fail to get a booster shot.
Breakthrough Omicron infections are rising among the 61% of the country’s fully vaccinated population; only 30% have gotten booster shots said to provide more protection.
end quotes
And stop the presses right there a minute!
Did they just say breakthrough Omicron infections are rising among the 61% of the country’s fully vaccinated population?
Yup, looking back at it a second time, they sure did!
Getting back to the story:
“He kept reiterating, ‘vaccines work, vaccines work,’ like a mantra, a talisman,” tweeted Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale University professor of epidemiology, adding Biden should have made clear a booster shot was key to protecting against the Omicron variant.
“This sounded like an administration caught flat-footed, running to play catch-up.”
end mquotes
And it sounds like that, because that is just what it is!
A big ******* mess!
Once Again Biden confirms he is an idiot.
C’mon, man, was that ever in doubt?
Funk Joe Biden and each and every one of you that voted for and support him.
HUGE NEWS TODAY:
Reuters
Christmas caller to Biden: ‘Let’s Go Brandon’
A vulgar anti-Biden slogan made for an awkward moment on Friday (December 24) during President Joe Biden’s phone calls with children tracking Santa’s flight when a father said, “Let’s Go Brandon.”
Am I the only person in the whole of the United States who finds it odd, disturbing, perverted and strange that cheering for NASCAR driver Brandon Brown, a true American hero if there ever was one, is now considered vulgar and anti-Joe Biden by America’s THOUGHT POLICE in the Biden administration?
Is it because Joe Biden hates NASCAR because Joe is un-American at heart?
Why else, afterall, would somebody hate NASCAR the way Joe Biden and his sycophants hate NASCAR that they are calling cheering for a top NASCAR driver to be vulgar and anti-Joe Biden?
LET’S GO, BRANDON, YOU’RE THE DUDE!